The Wyrd -- Fear Agent: Last Goodbye #1
Fear Agent Is Possibly The Best Comic You're Not Reading!
Fear Agent: Last Goodbye #1
November 19th, 2007 - I said I’d be all over the place, didn’t I? This isn’t particularly old—it’s a June 2007 release, which means it came out in what? May?—but it’s definitely something that should be on your radar. In many ways, “Fear Agent: The Last Goodbye” (number 1 of 4, and, somehow, number 12 of a series) is apparently a prequel to an earlier story which is recapped on the front back cover and alluded to in the first few pages, but honestly, this is a kick-ass story in its own right. Obviously I didn’t read the Fear Agent story that preceded this. But it really doesn’t matter.
To avoid spoilers, in case you want to go and read the first Fear Agent story, I won’t tell you what came before this. I read this whole issue and all it did was make me want to go back and find anything Fear Agents had to offer—this is a hardcore, visceral, beautifully-executed punch to the proverbial gut, using the simple premise that aliens want us dead and we’d really rather not have that, thank you very much.
I’ll get my chief—and ultimately very small—complaint out of the way. When we’re introduced to a younger, happier, less whisky-guzzling Heath Huston, we’re treated to just a wee bit too much ‘Texas-talk’. That’s my feeling, anyway. I’ve never been to Texas, but I feel like the amount of testosterone-fueled one liners and boot-themed aphorisms don’t fly quite as fast, furious, or frequent as they do in the intro. of Heath and his father. But getting past that, we can see a close familial bond and the welcome sense that these are normal guys from a fairly normal Texan family. We also get some insight into their political views and therefore the writer’s, Rick Remender (almost as cool of a name as the lead hero, I’m sure you’ll agree, AND reminds me of my favorite ill-fated 80’s-movie radio personality, Rockin’ Ricky Rialto). We get glimpses into the current, real-world situation—radio snippets of the Iraq war foreshadowing the trouble to come, and that’s a welcome addition. Most comics/TV shows/movies that throw in an Iraq mention manage to make it feel forced, but here it works, not only as foreshadowing, but as a glimpse into what might very well be the nature of the universe…
I hate spoilers, so I’m not going to get into specifics, but fairly quickly, the dung hits the fan. One minute Heath is talking to his dad about his wife’s temperament, and the next he’s embroiled in an intergalactic war, right there in Texas. The action is handled deftly, and that’s one aspect of most genre works-be it comics or movies or TV-that gets mishandled entirely too often. If you’re making a piece of fiction about, say, giant bugs, then you’re asking the audience to suspend plenty of disbelief right then and there. You better make the action—literally the physical events and choices that the characters make—follow common sense and the laws of probability. Because, when you get right down to brass tacks, that’s what matters in a story like this. You’ve got aliens—apparently three different kinds—and they’re fighting each other AND attacking us. Heath escapes with his wife, though certainly not unscathed—and set about finding other survivors, only to run into…well, you’ll find out.
This issue kicked me in the head. It showed me that you can do balls-to-the-wall action and carry off real, action-movie level suspense on the comics page, and that’s not something that gets accomplished often. It seems to harken back to a bygone era where all aliens were bad and America was ‘watching the skies’ for just this sort of threat, but in reality, the sci-fi genre has never given us anything like this before. This feels real, this feels urgent, this is intense stuff that manages to balance its intensity with witty, clever humor and character development. This is sci-fi with a shot of Jack Daniels, a war/invasion story that’s like a breeding of the best of James Cameron and Sam Peckinpah. It’s so good, I’m tracking down the rest of Rick Remender’s stuff. While he might not be trying to say anything about futurism, or push the boundaries of science fiction and what can be conceived, he DOES have plenty to say about the intricacies of the genre, the subtlety of well-handled action, and he makes great choices about how to tell this sort of story. It’s breathless, it’s unique, it gives us something we thought had come and gone but is in fact a new, thrilling entity all its own: this is Fear Agents, and in this story at least, it takes no prisoners. I look forward to what’s in store…
For more information visit the Dark Horse Comics website.