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By Jason Bourgeois
Whenever I do a review, I always like to throw in a little bit of history, if I can. Whether it's my personal history with the characters, creators, or title, or if it's about a title or character that has some interesting history. It's good to throw in those little tidbits, to make this less of a straight up review, what's good, what's bad, blah blah blah.
This month's comic has some very interesting history, indeed. This month I'm taking a look at the newly launched ongoing series, Agents of Atlas.
This title has its roots planted way back in the 50s, or at least the characters do. All of the characters involved were big during that time, to one degree or another. The ball doesn't really get rolling however, until the 70s, with Marvel's original What If series.
For those who don't know, What If was a book about, well, exactly what the title says; what if stories. What if Spider-Man wasn't bitten by the radioactive spider? What if Jean Grey had lived? What if the Avengers had formed in the 50s? And that's where our story begins. Instead of having some sort of Cap, Thor, and Iron Man analogues form a team in the 1950s, the writers decided to take a different approach. They decided to grab a bunch of mostly forgotten pre-Fantastic Four characters, and throw them together into a strange, off-beat team.
They used Jimmy Woo, just a regular guy, who was mostly known for fighting the Yellow Claw. Gorilla Man was another, who...well, figure it out! Venus joined the team, and she was the real goddess of love. A spaceman from Uranus, but originally from Earth, also was on the team as Marvel Boy. They also had the Sub-Mariner's cousin, Namora, the Human Robot, and finally 3-D Man, a strange man with stranger powers.
Looking over the team, I guess you could draw some parallels to the early Avengers, but overall they're pretty strained, and hardly analogues.
Some of the characters existed in the mainstream Marvel continuity, if not all, but they never teamed up in that way in the 'real' universe. Many of them would appear over the years, most notably Agent Woo, who eventually became an agent of SHIELD.
It wasn't until the 1990s, and Kurt Busiek, that they made any sort of return. Kurt wrote a 12 issue epic storyline, Avengers Forever, that set out to fix many of the continuity issues that had arisen over the years, and celebrate the long and varied history of the Avengers, and their future glory. In that storyline, a team of Avengers went into an alternate timeline, mostly the same as the What If story, and met their 1950s counterparts. Which they found weird, since there was no such team to the best of their knowledge!
Sadly, that reality was wiped out, and it seemed like a fun little throwaway team that had an odd little fan following, was gone for good. Until a few years ago, when the concept was revived via the first Agents of Atlas miniseries. It turned out these characters did indeed team up briefly during the 50s, although not as the Avengers. They banded together against Jimmy's frequent nemesis the Yellow Claw, and his organisation, the Atlas Foundation. The name itself being a reference to Marvel's earlier days as Atlas Comics, during which many of the previous adventures of these characters had been printed.
The miniseries tweaked the histories of these characters in little ways, which was needed to either bring them back to life, keep them young, not invalidate their past stories yet clean them up some, or to just make them stand out more than they once did. The book ended with the team inheriting Yellow Claw's legacy, leading a villainous organisation, which is definitely an interesting direction to take a team of heroes in. Jimmy figured this was best to try and limit their villainy, and maybe take their longtime enemies down from within.
With the setup out of the way, the title lay dormant for several years. It was an intriguing concept, and Marvel said they'd be back but it seemed unlikely that they'd ever get around to it, the more time went by. The new creator (Recreator?), Jeff Parker, would drop them into assorted stories he wrote in the intervening years to keep the characters alive, but still nothing happened.
Until this year, when the smoke cleared after Secret Invasion, and the Dark Reign began, did the Agents finally return. The title is, in many ways, the anti-Thunderbolts. Originally, Thunderbolts (Also by Kurt Busiek!), was about a team of villains, masquerading as heroes, doing villainous things behind the scenes. Agents of Atlas became a book about a group of heroes, pretending to be villains, while doing heroic things behind the scenes. In the world post-SI, where the villains were in charge, most notably Norman Osborn who currently leads the Thunderbolts, this was a very interesting idea to throw around. With the villains in charge, having a team of secret heroes, is just brilliant, in my opinion. It is a great play on old tropes, and a welcome sight.
The book has bounced between multiple time periods, both telling stories of the Agents fight against the status quo and trying to not be found out, and also including stories set in the past, filling in the blanks of their until-now non-existent history. It's a great book with very cool spy action, as well as a very bizarre cast of characters. They all are entertaining to watch in their own right, while struggling against acting like the bad guys. But really, they're a talking monkey, a silent robot, and a detached spaceman. It's like every weird scifi trope mixed together and left to boil. Fun, entertaining stuff.
The stories set in the past aren't just throwaways either, as they've become more interwoven into the main story, directly illuminating current events, and part of the story as a whole, or instead setting up something that pays off months down the road like an event in the most recent issue with the Human Robot recognising Wolverine as a past threat it encountered in the 50s.
While the book deals with moral quandaries, shades of grey, and where people draw those lines, it's kept fun and light with the humour and bizarreness from the characters. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something fun, but with a little meat to it, or if they want something that's a little bit different in the world of comics.
And really, any book that has a girl change her hair colour to red just because there are too many blondes on the team? Instant recommendation from me!
Jason M. Bourgeois
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