For Everyone Who May Have Been Thinking About Reading the New THUNDER Agents Series...

[johnny_kaos]

...don't. I just recently purchased five of the eight issues (non-consecutively) that have been published, and so far I'm pretty thoroughly unimpressed.

THUNDER Agents, for those who came in late, was a comic published in the '60s by Tower Comics and drawn (perhaps written, too? I don't recall offhand) by industry icon Wally Wood. It came about when

Comments

[paladine]

I was actually kind of interested in checking out Thunder Agents because Nick Spencer had written this really, really fun Jimmy Olsen backup in Action Comics that DOES embrace the craziness of superhero stuff (It opens with Jimmy the prisoner of a damn SPACE GENIE) and was a blast to read. Then I started following his War Machine series (called Iron Man 2.0 for some damn reason) and after a promising start and a lot build up...we get three issues in a row where you could count on one hand the number of scenes and lines War Machine actually got. then he wrote a fill-in issue of Secret Avengers which was unbelievably stupid. I just gave up on that guy after that.

Honestly, I think Spencer is a case of another indy guy who jumped to superhero comics not because he wanted to specifically but because of how collassally fucked the whole industry that's the only way you can make any money unless you're a Mike Mignola or Robert Kirkman who lucks out and establishes their own mini-empire of creator owned stuff.

[johnny_kaos]

I think I actually have all the issues of that backup, so it was running in Paul Cornell's Action Comics. I never paid much attention to it, though, since I usually don't pay attention to the backup stories (except in Greg Rucka's Detective Comics, where the Question backup was the whole reason I was buying the book). I might have to give that a look - although given this series and the fact that it sounds like this is pretty representative of most of his stuff, I have zero interest in reading most of his other stuff.

And I feel I should also point out that my comic shop was missing issues 3,4, and 7 - so it might have been that all the cool stuff happened in those issues. But there certainly wasn't anything cool in the issues I did read, and if you're eight issues into a series and only three of those have anything worthwhile happening, your book is still pretty much fucked.