Collider is an adult breast-expansion comic about particle physics, and it’s part of the finest tradition of comic book science. Don’t believe me? Read on.
Have you ever noticed that the origin of superpowers tends to change from one generation to another? Take Golden Age heroes like the Blue Beetle, Green Lantern or Hawkman for instance – their powers had magical origins, but their Silver Age counterparts had high-tech or alien origins. It’s the same with films; when Sam Raimi made his first Spider-Man movie in 2002, he kept many elements of the comic but replaced the radioactive spider with a genetically-engineered one. The message was clear: radiation, that source of so many Marvel Age powers, was out; new technobabble, from genetic engineering to nanotechnology to quantum consciousness, was in. And what better new technobabble than the world-famous, barely-understood Large Hadron Collider?
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) went online in 2008, some doomsayers predicted that it would destroy the world, creating stable microscopic black holes or even the theoretical particles known as strangelets. Sadly for the prophets but happily for everyone else, it didn’t. And now creators can explain all kinds of wackiness by using the LHC. It has the perfect features of a piece of comic-book technology: everyone’s heard of it, but nine out of ten people couldn’t tell you what it actually does. Including me: it’s a particle collider, but what that actually means I couldn’t tell you.
Whatever it does, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t do what Keedorah recruits it to do in Collider. I mean, I’m not a scientist, so if the LHC does grant people reality-warping mental powers (and vastly expanded bustlines), just let me know. But – and this is the key to understanding comic-book science – it’s fun to think about what would happen if it did.
Collider tells the story of a group of scientists based at the LHC in Switzerland. The story starts with a breathless in media res: the LHC has just been switched on, and something has gone terribly wrong. But it quickly becomes clear that the disaster is no accident. Strange energies fill the complex, releasing both hidden powers and hidden passions.
I don’t know what suggested the LHC for the theme here – if you squint at it, a map of the complex does look sort of like a breast, I guess? – but it’s apposite; the whole comic is about releasing forces beyond our control. Our heroes, Doctors Li and Linkova, both receive supercharged powers to go along with their supercharged chests, and it’s what they do with those powers that illuminates their characters. Linkova is a little reluctant at first, both to embrace her new powers and to accept her massive new endowment – but how long will her hesitation last, especially as Li’s agenda becomes clear?
Obviously, they use their powers to have lots of sex – that goes without saying. But their powers go beyond that. CERN is only the beginning, and the characters’ powers will take them into newer and ever-stranger places and to newer and stranger acts.
To find out more about Collider’s bra-busting journey of self-discovery, buy the full story here.
