Day Seventy-Eight: At Midnight, All The Agents
Marvel have this funny way with unknown properties. If they've got a mini-series or a new ongoing series coming out starring a character or characters who aren't big-name high-profile stars, then rather than doing what most of us would probably expect them to do - put a bit of positive publicity out there prior to launch, maybe do some house ads in the pages of their big-selling books, produce some posters for comic stores to put up, put it on the front of Marvel Previews or Comic Shop News - they tend to treat them like the kinds of travelling folk who turn up at your front door wanting to sell you clothes pegs or sharpen knives for you. They ignore them as much as they can while being polite and kind of act embarrassed until they go away.
Cases in point are numerous over the last few years. Gravity. Livewires. Spellbinders. Amazing Fantasy (post-Arana, anyway). These are series which are just kind of shoved out there into the cold like a geriatric Eskimo and expected to fend for themselves, while New Avengers and Astonishing X-Men are welcomed round the fire and given a warm blanket and a steaming mug of hot chocolate with cream and little marshmallows floating in it. A great shame of this approach is that a lot of these series are first-rate - Livewires, for example, was a great action story by Adam Warren and Rick Mays that'd knock your socks off. There's technically a digest of it available, but goodness knows whether it's in print or not.
Most recently in this vein, Marvel have given us Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk's excellent Agents of Atlas, a series featuring half a dozen characters who first turned up in Marvel titles of the 1950s. None of them are big names - Agent Jimmy Woo, Venus, Gorilla Man, M-11 the Human Robot, Namora and the original Marvel Boy. I can almost hear the big collective "WHOOOO?" going up from the less nerdy of you - they're so obscure that they're not even in the rather complete Official Handbook volumes I was talking about a few days ago. The most famous is probably Marvel Boy, and that's only because he came back from the limbo that was the Atlas Era (the infrequently-acknowledged gap between Marvel's Golden and Silver Ages) in a few issues of Fantastic Four.
The story of this series picks up in the present day, where Jimmy Woo, now getting on a bit, is an agent of SHIELD, Marvel's super-spy organisation. He goes into an ambush, gets his whole team killed and ends up both physically and mentally frazzled, lying in a recuperation bay on the Helicarrier. It's then that Gorilla Man, a fairly average guy who just happens to be trapped in the body of a gorilla and who is at this point fresh from the really, really dreadful Nick Fury's Howling Commandos series which came and went a couple of years ago, decides that he's going to break Jimmy out. One assist from the silent M-11 later, and the pair of them have high-tailed it with their erstwhile buddy. It seems that Gorilla Man wants to put the old team back together, you see, and for that they need Jimmy Woo. They also need Marvel Boy (last seen going crazy), Venus (last seen a long, long time ago) and Namora (last seen dead). Y'see, it seems that Woo was on the trail of a secretive society known as the Temple of Atlas, and really, none of these young punks have got what it takes nowadays...
Writer Jeff Parker's a bit of an ol' rising star at Marvel, having drawn attention to himself with his creator-owned Interman and now working on Marvel Adventures Avengers and X-Men: First Class, both of which are solidly good superhero books. With Agents of Atlas, he's been allowed perhaps a little more of a free rein to craft an intricate story, with enough noble death and resurrection, traitors within the ranks, evocations of the high adventure strips of the 1950s and gorillas holding machine guns in both their hands and both their feet to last anyone through the winter. Even though these aren't characters who've ever had a lot of on-panel time in the Marvel Universe, by the (really rather surprising) end of this series, you'll be so invested in them and their futures that you'll be desperate for the sequel. Said sequel, by the way, is teased by the final issue of this volume, and will make a lot of people quite annoyed if it doesn't turn up. Leonard Kirk also acquits himself well, bringing the same great composition of action sequences to Agents of Atlas that he brought to books like Bloodhound and Amazing Fantasy's Scorpion run.
Signs are apparently good for Agents of Atlas. Although the mini-series itself sold poorly, the collection has been solicited as a hardcover, featuring the whole series plus the original first appearances of the individual members of the team and the issue of the original run of What If...? which featured a prototype of the Agents as the 1950s Avengers. Ironically, it might well be the case that Marvel take notice of what a little marketing can do - Agents of Atlas was supported by a blog on Marvel.com ostensibly written by the mysterious Mr Lao, which set the readers up as the eponymous Agents and had them hunting all over the internet for clues and answers to puzzles. The game even went so far as to give readers a code word they would have to speak to their comic shop owner in order to receive another keyword in response, and at one point required some of the blog's readers to attend the San Diego Comic-Con to discover a further keyword. The game spread through word of mouth and promotion on all the comics news websites, and a groundswell of support for the book grew among vocal message board posters.
That might well be the solution. Take note, Marvel. If you want to sell books which are really good (into which category Agents of Atlas most certainly falls), then you might want to think about promoting them a little. Buy a few clothes pegs for us readers, would you?
