John Byrne's Next Men

Next Men
John Byrne's Next Men #1 (January 1992)
Publication information
Publisher	Dark Horse Comics IDW Publishing
Publication date	Vol. 1: February 1992–December 1994 Vol. 2: December 2010–August 2011 Next Men: Aftermath: February 2012–June 2012
No. of issues	Vol. 1: 31 (#0–30) Vol. 2: 9 Next Men: Aftermath: 5
Creative team
Written by	John Byrne
Artist(s)	John Byrne

John Byrne's Next Men (also known as Next Men or JBNM) is a comic book series written and drawn by John Byrne. The first volume of the series was published by Dark Horse Comics between 1991 and 1995. A nine-issue miniseries was published by IDW Publishing in 2010 and 2011, followed by another series titled Next Men: Aftermath, in 2012.

The Next Men characters made a prototypical appearance as "Freaks" in a lithography plate that was published within the History of the DC Universe Portfolio in 1986. Byrne had originally pitched the series to DC Comics, but the series never surfaced there. With some changes, Byrne changed the concept to fit in with his work on the graphic novel 2112, to become the John Byrne's Next Men series. Two characters from the "Freaks" artwork somewhat retained their physical looks and became the lead characters of the Next Men series: heroine Jasmine (aka "Jazz") and villain Aldus Hilltop.

The Next Men officially debuted in a four-part storyline in Dark Horse Presents #54-57 (later reprinted, in color, as John Byrne's Next Men #0). The series ran until issue #30 and ended with a cliffhanger. According to Byrne, he intended the series to be science-fiction that had a "sort of smell" of being a super-hero book. In addition to exploring mature topics such as sex, abortion, and child abuse, Byrne also set aside some of the more-traditional conventions of the medium, such as "thought-bubbles" and sound-effects.

Byrne had intended to conclude the story in a second series after a six-month hiatus, but the collapse of the American comic-book industry in the mid-1990s made it financially unfeasible for him to do so, and he returned to working for hire at DC Comics and Marvel Comics.

On October 12, 2007, Byrne announced on his website that comic publisher IDW would release black and white "phonebook"-sized reprints of the Next Men series sometime in 2008, with the first collection released in May 2008. He stated on his message board: