One Coin Reads 28: Fear Agent volume 3, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Matthew Hawthorne

Fear Agent volume 3, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Matthew Hawthorne

2009-2011

Purchased at the same time I got the second collection, I finally finished off the book Fear Agent.

Grizzled

With this, I've read half of the run. I haven't bought the first, and there is a fourth odds-and-ends book, but Book 3 officially ends the story. With Book 2, I was a little confused as to what the whole concept was, as the first of the two arcs there occurred before the events of the first book. Here, I mostly understand the world and have a history with the characters, but it's wrapping up storylines I missed the first chapter of. As a result, perhaps some of the things don't hit quite as deeply. But for the most part, any praise or criticism I have for this isn't too connected to the bigger story.

Space cowboys

As a quick refresher, Fear Agent is pulp sci-fi, with the name and title font being a big hint of that. It's closer to 50's sci-fi in tone than to the "hard sci-fi" which is normal today. Humanity has largely been wiped out, and star Heathrow Huston is an alcoholic Texan floating from one crappy situation to the next, surviving by the skin of his teeth.

The best thing about this is that it has fun. It's full of dark, bleak situations, but tries to make the story pulpy and crazy. The flip side of that though is that when the book wants to have heavy emotion, it struggles because it's all so goofy.

There's a lot of flashback exposition in this run

The last collection had an arc by Tony Moore, and another by Jerome Opeña, and with that, I definitely preferred Opeña's. Here, Opeña was probably busy drawing X-Force or something, and the art is done by Moore and Matthew Hawthorne. Both are very competent artists, but they both lack the ability to give the book drama. The back cover has a blurb of praise from Jack Davis, of E.C. Comics and Mad fame, and he was a guy who could have pulled it off. A book like this requires some old school skills to ground the ridiculous.

It's a solid sequence, but the grizzle isn't grizzled enough for me

Moore and Hawthorne are doing fine work on this, but I don't think they are a perfect match for the material.

The collection contains two arcs, and the second works better than the first. In the first, I Against I, Huston crash lands on an alien planet with a Wild West style city filled with humans, some that he knows. The reason for this is very convoluted and probably what held it back for me. There is a time-displaced version of Huston there, a doppelgänger, and trying to make it make sense was too much for me. Remender had a vision of Huston fighting Huston, and a plot resolution of the story that was really inventive, so I understand why he wanted to get there, but the book creaks while trying to make this goofy sci-fi make sense. I would just as well have seen him do some hand-waving and go straight to the fireworks factory.

The fireworks factory

The second arc, Out of Step, worked better for me, with a winding yet coherent path to the end of the series. An aged, lonely Huston wanders the galaxy nursing an unhealthy degree of alcoholism. The book has had some time travel shenanigans in the previous arcs, and the final solution for the depressed Huston is to fix time itself.

This isn't a very honest portrayal of alcoholism as Huston is super high functioning. At this point, he should at least have puffy skin

The story is about someone on their last legs, having mostly given up, and it's decent. As an end to the series, the climax tries to make it both galaxy-altering and personal to Huston. This series has had so many shock endings and deaths of main characters, that there is actually a lot of doubt as to how it might resolve. A happy ending isn't a given in the world that's been set up here. 

At the end of it all, it was a satisfactory resolution. Not mind-blowing, but plot resolutions rarely are.

Overall, I liked this series. I didn't love it, but the idea behind it, to make a modern, expanded version of the old pulp stories, was nice to read.

Remender is one of the contemporary comic writers who I've been trying to get a better understanding of. I never quite love what he's doing, but I really find it compelling. With this series, I like the exploration of grief and alcoholism in a book with exploding space monsters. 

There's a lot more flashback exposition in the second arc too

I have a couple more series of his that I'm looking forward to digging into. I've read the first arc of Low and Black Science, and especially with Low, I felt like the art was capable of carrying the drama of the book. 

A book like Fear Agent though seems more fun than anything else. The pathos and the emotion end up being dressing for the blood and aliens.

Blast off!

That's okay though. I definitely got my worth out of these collections. They were enjoyable and worth revisiting someday.