The Interman by Jeff Parker (Octopus, $19.95)

Remember when The Six Million Dollar Man was cool? The first season or two had Steve Austin as a reluctant spy, drawn into a world not of his own choosing, and featured a subtext that debated what the difference between a man and a machine was as he adjusted to his bionic parts. Granted, the last season or two bordered on self-parody, but the early episodes are what selective memory recalls.

The Interman reminds me a lot of the textual elements of The Six Million Dollar Man updated for the age of biotechnology and drawn with the look of a ’40s adventure comic strip such as Buzz Sawyer or Johnny Hazard.

The hero of this story is the product of a discontinued government genetics experiment who has the ability to physically adapt to his environment. That is to say, his body adapts to breathe water, he can digest poison, and he can mimic the actions of others among the less odd manifestations of his genes.

When a series of events causes the intelligence community to believe he’s gone rogue, our hero is drawn into a world of assassins and spies as he tries to discover the nature of his origins and get the government off his back while he’s still alive.

While this isn’t a story about a super-CIA agent like The Six Million Dollar Man was, it does draw on similar themes. The everyman caught up in an espionage/assassination game is a tried-and-true plot point. Ask Alfred Hitchcock. It was one of his favorites.

But adding paranormal abilities and having the lead character question whether he’s still a man if he has these odd gifts result in a philosophical undercurrent and character exploration that’s not always common in adventure fiction.

What you end up with is a character-driven, science-fiction tinged, globetrotting spy movie in sequential art. Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. The author has a eight-page preview of a key sequence online at theinterman.com/start.html that will give a feel for the ’40s action-strip look and the Steve Austin-getting-in-over-his-head vibe, if not the philosophical deliberations.