Bionic - a Top Shelf graphic novel

I grew up watching both The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman (and always wondered why they put the price tag on the "man" but gave no value to the "woman" ... food for thought).  The idea of bionics fascinated me as a kid, and just the thought of having these extra abilities to run really fast, bend steel with your hands, and to see or hear at great distances - I spent hours playing make-believe that I had these abilities.  But, of course, those were only television shows and complete fiction.  At the time.  While we still don't have the "bionics" that were created in those shows, we do have artificial limbs and such that allow people to walk again, as well as hear, see, and other things that we would have never dreamed possible just a few decades ago.  So, when I saw a new graphic novel called Bionic advertised in the Previews some months back, my mind automatically returned to my childhood TV shows, and I ordered it thinking it would be along those lines.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Bionic is the creation of Koren Shadmi, and while I have never heard of Shadmi before, he apparently has done a number of graphic novels, including several biographical type tales of Bela Lugosi and Rod Serling, among others.  Bionic, though, is thoroughly fiction (science-fiction, at that).  It is the story of Victor, a young computer nerd who really, really, REALLY wants to go out with Patricia the beautiful young rich girl in his class.  But she is way out of his league, and the boy she is interested in is nothing but a bully - especially to Victor!  Patricia doesn't even notice Victor - not really.  But then, one day, everything changes.

Patricia is hit by a car, and she is out of school for weeks.  Victor visits her in the hospital, but she is unaware he is there.  When she does finally return to school, she is changed - drastically.  Patricia's father owns a company that works in bionics - and his daughter has now become the prime example of what his company can do for people injured in accidents!  While no one says it to her face, everyone - including her former best friends and her former boyfriend - thinks Patricia is a freak of nature.  But not Victor.  Victor still finds her beautiful, even more so now that she is half cyborg.  He finally gets the chance to be friends with her, because he is the only one to accept her for who she really is.  But that begs the question - who is Patricia?

Shadmi presents readers with a lot of ambiguity with regards to Patricia, some of the questions about which never get answered, leaving it up to the reader to decide for themselves.  Is Patricia's father truly using his own daughter for the benefit of his company?  Or is Patricia merely looking for more attention that she doesn't believe she is getting at home?  Is she using Victor only because he is willing to be seen with her, or does she need Victor because he's the only one who truly listens to her?  There are plenty of secrets that everyone is hiding within the story - Victor's father, Patricia's father, Patricia's friends, and even Victor himself as revealed in the final few panels of the story.  This is definitely not a story with a happy ending, but it is a tale that deals with the reality of relationships and real people, and how easy it is to see what we want to see in others, and how easily we judge others only what we see.

The art is rather stylistic - not the normal style that I would like, but the more I got into the story, the more it felt appropriate for the tale Shadmi was telling.  And the manner in which Shadmi tells the story through the art - the first six pages have absolutely no dialogue, and yet they set the tone for the entire story and even provide foreshadowing that the reader is completely unaware of until the final pages.  All of the characters are unique and provide representation of everyday people (instead of everyone being beautiful and buff as you see in most comics), and Shadmi has a way with his characters' expressions that make the reader truly feel what the character is feeling in each panel.  In this way, Shadmi draws the reader into the tale, so that you find yourself rooting for Victor through the entire book, only to have your heart broken right along with his by the end of the story.

Bionic was not at all what I was expecting, but it was definitely a story worth reading.

RATING:  8 Muddy Paws t-shirts out of 10 for showing the reality that sometimes flesh and blood can be much colder than hardened steel.