Shaun's back with another review of a book Trey has chosen to unfairly ignore. This time: T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents!
"T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents are on the move, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents are loose!" Wait, wrong series. I apologize to ThunderCats fans everywhere. And now back to the matter at hand. Around August 2010, every comic website was making much ado about apparent comic wunderkind Nick Spencer. Spencer had previously written three comic mini-series for Image in 2009 (Existence 2.0/3.0, Shuddertown and Forgetless) and showed no sign of slowing down, launching Morning Glories in August 2010. That series was a runaway hit, selling out of its 1st, 2nd and 3rd printings. He followed the pattern of every writer to get noticed by the Big Two recently. Namely, create an indie series with wild imaginative concepts, and Marvel and/or DC will come a-callin'. While nothing is inherently wrong with this model, it does tend to blow up in the Big Two’s faces every now and then. After all, just because you can create some great things on your own (and certainly no knock against that), how do the editors really know that you can successfully steer the niche superhero market of rabid fanboys/girls? They don’t, but their logic is admirable. Some of the biggest names of the last fifteen years came straight out of the indie scene (Bendis, Brubaker, Fraction, Hickman, Remender and Lemire to name a few). So it came as no surprise when in October 2010 DC announced that Spencer would be launching a new series based on an old property, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and taking over the helm of Supergirl.
Naturally, being a bit of a DC fan, I picked up T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents issue one when it launched in November 2010. Around issue two I found myself really enjoying this espionage/super heroics/political intrigue series Spencer was crafting. Before the DC relaunch of last September I even would have put it in the top 5 of their monthly titles. But backtracking a bit, Spencer signed an exclusive deal with Marvel in February 2011. Due to editorial conflicts he penned a mere ¾ of his debut Supergirl issue (which is a real shame since it was one of the best in that series). According to the deal he was allowed to finish his work on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. But to fans of the series, what did finish mean exactly? Ongoing series can last years or even decades. Well along came the relaunch, and with it T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents ended at issue 10. Yet fans could rejoice! It was coming back in November of 2011 for a six issue wrap up.
Four issues in I am sad to report that this six issue mini-series pales in comparison to the previous one. Let me say that it has become apparent in Spencer’s writing that he loves four things, yet deploys them with varying success. One, he loves pop culture references that can painfully date when he wrote an issue. Two, he employs misdirection so much that the misdirection can become obvious. Example: a character that you are supposed to think is shady ISN’T actually shady, but then they ARE shady for another reason altogether. (How many times can I use shady in a paragraph?) Three, he always has a character that embodies the vocal zeitgeist of youth or young adult culture. Essentially this character knows everything cool that hipsters know and thinks out loud for the audience. Four, he is far too concerned about the long term instead of employing his best skills in the present. He once said in an interview that Morning Glories is mapped out for one hundred issues. It is nice to know where you are going, but it seems a tad pretentious to believe any comic series can sustain that kind of longevity when you have only written a handful of issues.
And therein lies the problem with this T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents relaunch. It picks up directly where issue 10 of the previous series ended, but jumbles all of Spencer’s long term goals for the series. For example, the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents themselves are almost entirely neglected. You would think that each of these individuals-who-are-wearing-equipment-that-gives-them-superpowers-they-know-will-kill-them would get the spotlight. Nope. The rookie handlers Colleen and Toby (who, granted, wears one of said items) are the main focus. Two of the other Agents die in what is supposed to be dramatic fashion, but since you have no real reason to care about them, you kinda go, “Whelp, he's dead.”
Let me stress that this is not a bad series. It has decent art from Wes Craig and employs the likes of comic veterans Jerry Ordway, Walt Simonson and Sam Keith for flashback sequences. The core concept is also a fun one, it's just unfortunate that Spencer either neglected the Agents' personalities, or just didn’t have the amount of issues he wanted to explore them. Then again, maybe that is a reflection of my critique of him in general (and perhaps this long winded review), he never gets to the point fast enough.
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