Bionic

By Martha Cornog

Bionic centers on the flawed romance between two high school students: Victor and Patricia. Patricia’s father runs Venn Industries, which manufactures  robotic replacement parts for injured humans (i.e., prostheses), including eventually the pretty Patricia. Victor’s father works for that corporation.

Science fiction comics starring a beautiful bionic girl have already attracted large fandoms, especially through two popular manga/anime characters: Major Matoko Kusanagi of the Ghost in the Shell stories, and Alita of the Battle Angel Alita manga series. Other graphic novels centering on the body enhancement theme include fiction/nonfiction blended in Helene Chauchois’ The Body Factory and the fictional manga series titled Run on Your New Legs.

The Matoko and Alita science fiction stories focus on these women’s dramatic and dangerous abilities, while Run on Your New Legs tells a more realistic account of a young male athlete’s perseverance and successes with a prosthetic limb. None of these stories incorporate romantic themes as major plot elements. Matoko and Alita are both beautiful and sexy as well as impossibly capable physically, but only Matoko’s ultimate “merger” with the sentient Puppet Master AI program suggests a liaison analogous to sexual contact.

In Bionic, the overall theme is simply growing up sociosexually, the bionic element adding an additional challenge to make more compelling the usual teen issues of parents, school, dating, and side hustles. This proceeds more realistically than it would in the Archie Comics universe, where comedy and benevolent adults often characterize the teens’ environment. But in Bionic, the parents are not honest and may not have their offspring’s best interests at heart. And the kids themselves can vary from merely shallow to dangerously predatory.

And unlike the Archie kids, the teens of Bionic do grow up in the story. How do they develop?

Victor, the main character, does not manifest initially as a teenage hero or “victor” of any sort. He is thin, wan, homely, inept at sports, shy with peers, the butt of jokes and horseplay from his hunky male contemporaries. Certainly he does not attract girls, though he would like to—especially pretty fellow student Patricia Partzfall. Note, again, the name: Patricia = patrician? “Partzfall” = “parts fail”? “Parts fall off”? We will soon learn.

Victor does excel at electronics and at videogames. He and his geeky pal Gus hang out at the gaming arcade in the nearby mall, and his part-time job involves fixing damaged components for a self-employed resale dealer—high school dropout Dan, who regularly cons Victor out of his commission. But Victor lacks the confidence to demand his payments, despite Gus’s urging. And when run off the road nastily by two high school bullies on motorcycles, Victor only slinks off and later repairs the dents in his bike’s frame.

As school starts for the term, Victor finds himself assigned to sit next to Patricia, who lights up the whole class with her appeal and good humor. The girls vie to friend her; the guys attempt to date her. She’s not interested in Victor, but is polite to him. But Victor is smitten, though he is not optimistic about his chances. Learning she part-times for a pet shop, he strikes up a friendship centering on “Watt,” a cute bionically-enhanced cat that seems to be a secret. With Patty’s approval, Victor adopts Watt, keeping him hidden from his family. Meanwhile, Patty dates one of the class hunks, but breaks it off when he tries to go too far sexually with her.

Then Patty is hit by a car, ending up in the hospital. Victor visits her room, but she’s unconscious and bandaged heavily. When she reappears at school weeks three weeks later, the entire left side of her body gleams from her new metal prosthetic parts. Her resurrection to a quasi-normality despite the accident comes courtesy of Venn Industries, her father’s company. Indeed it becomes obvious that the achievements of Venn Industries exceed the present-day capabilities of prosthetics. But from an object of desire at school, Patty has transformed into an object of pity, curiosity, and scorn. Only Victor remains drawn to her as friend and would-by lover, telling her she looks cool. They enter a push-pull phase, Patty sometimes welcoming his attentions and sometimes retreating. And when she begins calling on him to ditch class to be with her, he is tested further. When both are suspended, his parents become outraged. But, movingly, he had grown a spine at last, refusing her request that interferes with a school test and telling his parents he knows his father has been lying to them. Let go from Venn Industries, the father had been spending workdays at a café to keep wife and son from finding out.

Finally, Victor and Patty have some honest conversations, and do engage in (inexplicit) sex. But her orgasm while holding his hand results in her left hand with its superhuman strength crushing his right hand. He passes out, waking up in the hospital with bandages. The push-pull with Patty continues after his discharge, however. She wonders if her father engineered her accident just to show off his company’s skills; Victor is still in love with her but now wiser. Finally she rejects him more emphatically and directly, saying she needs space to grow up and figure herself out—if she survives that long. Their pet cat Watt has died—will that happen to Patty eventually? Victor rides off on his bike in tears, the rushing air blowing loose the bandaging of his wounded hand. In the climax of the story, we see it is now a bionic hand, supplied by Venn Industries. Unwillingly free of Patricia at last, he has nonetheless acquired a new commonality with her that he will have always. And in leading him to stand up for himself, she has also given him the gift of himself, if not herself. Now Victor stands up to Dan, his exploitive boss, demanding that Dan pay for work Victor has done. He is beginning to live up to his name.

While Bionic is science fiction, the body changes undergone by Patricia could stand in for any visible and serious disease carrying an unknown prognosis and being treated experimentally. The stigma of appearing incurably “different” inevitably affects personality and behavior of any new patient—and patience with oneself does not come easily if at all.

Readers interested in the current state of actual human prosthetics would enjoy the Chauchois graphic novel as well as Mary Roach’s Replaceable You. Additionally, the web is a source of images and information about glamorous “designer prostheses.” While most prosthetics work is designed to help amputees blend into the rest of humanity, creators of such striking limbs cater to amputees wanting to stand out.

Other readers may remember reading the classic Oz books, in which two characters, especially, embody the artificial body theme: the formerly all-human Tin Woodman, and the always fully mechanical Tik-Tok. These characters and their unique talents are fully accepted without stigma by the Oz world.

Bionic features male and female partial nudity, inexplicit sexual contact, and some violence. The story could resonate with anyone age 17 up who looks to understand the effects upon the self of amputation or other serious health challenges, especially when obvious to observers. (There are about 2 million limb amputees in the United States.^1,2) The art is muted full color, especially strong in green-brown colors and with mostly-realistic characters somewhat elongated. There is no bibliography or information about actual 21^st century prosthetics, however, nor any explanation of how Venn Industry products might work.

____________

Retired librarian Martha Cornog (MA, MLS) has been reviewing graphic novels for Library Journal since 2006 and coedited two books about comics. she adapted some of Katsu Aki’s Mange Sutra for Tokyopop; serviced as an Eisner and Glyph Awards judge, and moderated comics panels at conventions, including the Graphic Medicine conference. She is currently creating Comic Troika, a comics adaptation of three humorous Russian stories.

References

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7047902/pdf/eor-5-65.pdf
2. https://promedeast.com/limb-loss-statistics/