Man's Best by Pornsak Pichetshote, Jesse Lonergan, and Jeff Powell

If I were cynical - and I am, a lot of the time - I'd think of this book as "We 3, but with a happy ending!" or maybe, more vaguely, "We 3 in SPAAAACE!"

That might be reductive, but, really, how many other comics about three uplifted and cyborged animals fighting to save their humans can you think of? Sometimes, the precursor is glaringly obvious.

Man's Best is a 2024 SF comic, originally five issues long and then collected into a single book-sized volume, written by Pornsak Pichetshote, drawn and colored by Jesse Lonergan, and lettered by Jeff Powell. (I don't usually credit letterers, but Powell is on the cover, and I try to defer to the book most of the time.)

There is a starship, heading to an alien planet to test a terraforming device. Earth, of course, is falling apart in the background, for thematically important but non-specific "people are fighting" reasons - it's not quite the '70s-standard population-bomb argument, but maybe a revised and updated version of that. Among the humans, there is a Captain and a Doctor, and then an undifferentiated mass of everyone else.

The Doctor - a woman, and very feminine-coded, with big fluffy hair and huge circular glasses - has three animals, said specifically to be for emotional support on this journey. (The Captain is similarly masculine-coded, all craggy features and eyepatch.) But the animals also are heavily cyborged, or maybe just lightly cyborged (one definitely has a new leg) and live inside exoskeletons that augment them. They are Athos, Porthos, and....Lovey; two dogs and a cat, with the cat as the leader in a twist that will amuse anyone who has ever met a cat.

For some reason - this really isn't clear - the Doctor is running the animals through training sessions in what seems to be a Star Trek holodeck, in which they fight giant robots they call Klangers. This is the beginning of the story, so they do not work well together, and fail. This clearly sets up Narrative Tension for when the animals have to battle robots for real later in the book.

Anyway, the planet they're supposed to test the terraforming doohickey on is missing, which leads to some doomy speeches from the humans. But a planet suddenly appears, and the ship crashes into it. The animals wake up, somewhat later, in the wreckage. The humans are all gone.

So they decide - not without squabbling, because we need to see them squabble a lot for aforementioned Narrative Tension reasons - to save the Doctor and the Captain, somehow, using their various technological enhancements and The Power of Friendship. (Well, they don't say the latter.)

The planet they landed on is some kind of third-generation copy of the Well World, with various regions separated by some kind of gates - we don't see big walls around the hex-equivalents, so it might be implemented somewhat differently, but it's the same idea: a big planet full of sentients from lots of other planets all over the place, each in their own habitat. And, of course, there are robots that run the whole thing, which are hostile to Our Animal Heroes. Plenty of the inhabitants of the individual regions are somewhat hostile, too, so there's a lot of running and fighting and squabbling, as the animals see their tech enhancements get degraded, destroyed, or removed along the way.

They also learn a bit about the purpose of this world, and do, of course, eventually get to the Doctor and the Captain, where there is a Shocking Revelation and a big Boss Fight with a robot that looks just like the one from their training. In the aftermath, the animals need to make a decision about The Fate of Earth, and we readers think they make a pretty good one - but it is a bit of a "Lady and the Tiger" ending as to whether their decision will work.

For all of the "Earth is doomed because people Can't Get Along" talk and the eternally-squabbling animals, this is a fairly positive story: it does come down on the side of humanity being salvageable, which could be a bit of a stretch in a story about uplifted animals made to fight robots. I found it a bit talky but pleasant, and didn't argue with the premises (how are these animals uplifted? they seem to be just plain shelter rescues who can magically talk to each other in clear idiomatic English and eventually communicate with humans, too) as much as I normally would. And Lonergan is a great story-telling artist, particularly for SF stories like this one: he gives the action sequences a lot of punch and energy.

I found Man's Best to be somewhat lighter and fluffier than I think it wanted me to, but it's just fine for what it is. And if you want cyborged-animals-fighting-robots action, it can't be beat.