Comics I Bought This Week: September 24, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics but I did get a hard cover collection:

The Incredible Hercules: Dark Reign

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

Agents of Atlas: Dark Reign by Jeff Parker and Various Artists

I picked this book up because of a friend's recommendation. Unfortunately I found it a bit of a disappointment. It just didn't make any sense to me. It's another one of those books that makes the 2009 Marvel Universe look like the 1999 Wildstorm Universe. I know that doesn't bother a lot of people because they didn't read Wildstorm books in 1999 but I did.

The Agents of Atlas are a group of heroes posing as villains while running an evil secret organization. What? That makes no sense. They are trying to make the world a better place by running an evil organization and "Fighting it from the inside". That's like trying to stop Josef Stallin by running the Communist party for him. I don't get it.

And who are the villains of the book? The U.S. government of course. Much like the Wildstorm Universe of 1999 there are now tons of evil "Black Ops" organizations secretly running the Marvel Universe U.S. government. Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, is in charge of national security. What? Nobody has noticed that he was a super villain for fifty years? And he hire all his old thug super villains to work for the NSA. What? In our world the Feds don't want to hire you if you smoked pot in college but in the new Marvel Universe it's okay for super villains to be federal agents? It makes no sense to me.

And what do the Agents of Atlas do to change their evil organization from within? Nothing really. After all they have to pretend to be evil in order to run the thing. Am I the crazy one? The did sell Norman Osborn and the US government some guns that didn't work. Oh great, now US soldiers will get killed and taxes will go up to pay for these non-functioning guns. How is this fighting evil?

They do flash back to the 1950's Agents of Atlas all the time. At least in that part of the story the heroes were heroes and didn't senselessly run an evil organization.

But I've wasted enough time on this comic. The people who made it are not untalented and it is pretty well drawn and well written. It just doesn't overcome it's own flawed premise for me. "Changing the system from inside" stories rarely work for me and it doesn't here.