"The Manhattan Projects - Vol. 1: Science Bad" portrays USA's finest military and science experts as murderous madmen

What if the "genius" men behind the (in)famous Manhattan Projects from the middle of the last century weren't the celebrated and brilliant generals and scientific experts we consider them to be, but something else altogether?  What if one of them was a multiple-personality homicidal maniac who only appears to be normal, and in fact is anything but?  What if there were aliens from other cosmos who agreed to help us in destroying our enemies in exchange for other favors?  Such an alternate reality is a product of writer Jonathan Hickman and artist & illustrator Nick Pitarra, and their creation is a comic book series that, for the most part, defies genre conventions.

In The Manhattan Projects Volume 1: Science Bad, Hickman and Pitarra introduce us to the primary characters that will drive their narrative forward.  They consist of the leading military expert of the top secret project, General Leslie Groves, who is in charge of the entire operation; Dr. Joseph Oppenheimer, a man who "is not his own brother", and who appears to have psychological problems of the worst possible kind; Richard Feynman is a physicist who has a strange affection for his own appearance; and rounding out the rest of the main characters is a dejected looking Albert Einstein, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in form of an Artificial Intelligence, and Wernher von Braun, a rocket scientist from Germany who possesses a prosthetic arm.

The tone of this first Trade Paperback volume is satirical, to say the least, and infused with plenty of the absurd (Japanese Kamikaze Killing Machine attacks the Manhattan Projects secret base!) and the truly bizarre (alien Siill and his buddies, from a far away galaxy, who offer the above mentioned characters "the stars" in exchange for future favors of yet undetermined nature).  The violence is campy, the dialogue is bordering on the humorously outlandish, and the storyline consists of an alternate reality where just about anything can - and does - happen.  Hickman's and Pitarra's The Manhattan Projects may not be for the mainstream comic buffs who grew up on Marvel and DC's superheroes' universe, but for those who are fans of other Image sci-fi & horror serials of the peculiar kind, such as Black Science, Nameless and Cry Havoc (to name just a few), it should satisfy their sweet tooth just enough to keep reading further.
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