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What’s better than a team with a talking gorilla and a robot who doesn’t make a sound?

Sure, the Greg Land cover to Agents of Atlas #2 makes the team look like superheroes, brave and gallant, flying off to meet some unseen foe.  In flashbacks interspersed through this issue, you see them as 1950’s super heroes and they even look quaint and a bit naive facing some extra-dimensional The Right Stuff-meets-flying-zombies threat.  Actually those flashbacks make things look a lot simpler back then for the Agents.  Marvel Boy is in his classic costume.  Jimmy Woo looks like the happy-go-lucky FBI agent.  Gorilla Man looks touristy in his casual shirt and pork-pie hat and even the goddess Venus looks like she’s out for a date with her man even as the team gets called on a Scooby-Doo type mystery.  And when the working day is done, it’s “tiki time!”

Contrast that against the present day sequences where the Agents of Atlas are trying to deal with a corrupt government agency.  More than dealing with the government, the Agents are trying to sell them weapons, hoping to appease the high and mighty Norman Osborne.  Jimmy Woo is trying to run his own underground organization while trying to keep an ancient dragon (don’t ask) happy.  Gorilla Man has abandoned the pork-pie and now has a couple of guns strapped to his sides.  Marvel Boy ditched the red and blue costume and now wears a gray bodysuit and fishbowl helmet.  These are different times and it calls for a different Agents of Atlas team.

Jeff Parker’s story nicely contrasts what the Agents once were and what they are now.  As the world has changed, the Agents have also had to change, even if they didn’t want to.  In the past, you can see that they were just adventurers with no responsibility other than to the next adventure.  But now, they have masters and ideals that have to be served.  They gained power but lost their freedom.  It’s great that Parker has these old characters who have had so little of their past explored.  That gives him a lot of room and space in this book, where he can play nicely with things like “Dark Reign” and Marvel continuity while having chunks of story exploring an unknown past of these characters.

Carlo Pagulayan and Jason Paz art fits in nicely with Marvel’s established artists like Leinel Yu and Salvador Larocca without falling into some of the clarity and likeness pitfalls of those artists.  Pagulayan and Paz can pull of the fantastic like the Agents’ flying saucer, the creepy like Marvel Boy’s alieness and the action like Namorita taking on the enemy forces.  Like Leonard Kirk on the Agents of Atlas miniseries, they can nicely tell the story without falling back on unneeded pyrokinetics and flash.  Joining them this issue is Gabriel Hardman who draws the flashback sequences.  Hardman’s artwork is similar to Charlie Adlard or Tony Moore and other artists who use a lot of ink on the page.  Hardman’s artwork manages to be old-timey without being cheesy or overly nostalgic.  It’s very different from Pagulayan’s polished artwork but nicely contrasts it as both illustrate two different but connected parts of Parker’s story.

Two issues in and Parker is already establishing a nice feeling for this book.  I don’t think this will be a book about heroes and villains but it can still be about doing right or wrong.  That’s the choices that it looks like the Agents will have to make—can they continue to protect themselves without crossing the line?

Agents of Atlas #2
“The Sale/ The Dragon’s Corridor Part 1”
Written by: Jeff Parker
Penciled by: Carlo Pagulayan and Gabriel Hardman
Inked by: Jason Paz and Gabriel Hardman
Colored by: Jana Schirmer and Elizabeth Dismang Breitweiser
Lettered by: Blambot’s Nate Piekos

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