It’s not a superhero comic unless “being a thinly veiled Hunter S. Thompson analogue” counts as a superpower, but Ellis’s Transmetropolitan regularly uses low-grade transhumanism as a backdrop to its core story of political journalism. It starts out being mainly a shock-value thing—the first few panels in its core setting mention or depict advanced information warfare leading to autocannibalism, a guy selling his skin for ad space, and a subculture whose adherents splice alien DNA into their own to express a type of species dysphoria—but later it evolves into a more nuanced approach.
By the end of the series the message seems to be that no matter how we permute our cultures or our bodies, human value systems will end up leading to largely the same types of conflicts. Which seems like a fairly realistic approach, given that strongly transhuman intelligence is absent from the setting.
Ellis’s Black Summer also depicts an explicitly transhuman version of what’s essentially DC Comics’ Justice League, but that’s a more obscure series and the morality in it is a lot murkier.
It’s not a superhero comic unless “being a thinly veiled Hunter S. Thompson analogue” counts as a superpower, but Ellis’s Transmetropolitan regularly uses low-grade transhumanism as a backdrop to its core story of political journalism. It starts out being mainly a shock-value thing—the first few panels in its core setting mention or depict advanced information warfare leading to autocannibalism, a guy selling his skin for ad space, and a subculture whose adherents splice alien DNA into their own to express a type of species dysphoria—but later it evolves into a more nuanced approach.
By the end of the series the message seems to be that no matter how we permute our cultures or our bodies, human value systems will end up leading to largely the same types of conflicts. Which seems like a fairly realistic approach, given that strongly transhuman intelligence is absent from the setting.
Ellis’s Black Summer also depicts an explicitly transhuman version of what’s essentially DC Comics’ Justice League, but that’s a more obscure series and the morality in it is a lot murkier.