I quit collecting comics in 2003. It had been nearly 16 years since I started buying comics on a weekly basis, over 800 consecutive weeks. Buying comics was so important to me that if vacations were going to be planned, I needed to make sure that there would be a place for me to get my comics. When I visited prospective colleges, one of the most important questions I asked was “Where’s the nearest comicbook store?” Hell, when my grandfather died in 2000 and I spent a week in Florida for the funeral, I still found time to go to a comicbook store and get my weekly fix.
So why did I stop? Part of was necessity. My first job out of college was for an advertising company in New York City. I was let go in April 2002, and the job I took after that came with a significant cut in salary. In 2002 was spending $30 - $40 dollars a week on comics; that kind of spending was out of the question on my new budget. Also, honestly, I think by that time I was just getting tired of the weekly ritual, of the collector mentality that said “You must buy this!” At some point in the first half of 2003, a week came where I did not by a comicbook, and I have been (mostly) sober for 450 weeks since.
The reason I own even this one issue at all is because of two things: Gail Simone and Deadpool. When Agent X came out, Gail Simone was a relatively new writer, having transitioned into comics after writing “You’ll All Be Sorry” a series of hysterical columns for the website Comic Book Resources. She was also a semi-regular poster on the Warren Ellis Forum, the web forum I lurked at in the early 2000s, so when she announced her regular gig on the title Deadpool, a character that always had one foot in melodrama while the other foot slipped on a banana peel, I knew I’d be along for the ride.
That ride would turn out to be short-lived: Deadpool was cancelled not long after Simone was announced as the new writer. Simone wrote all of four issues of Deadpool and she and the rest of the creative team moved to a new ongoing series, Agent X. Agent X has that same “Hey, you’ve got your comedy stuck in my drama; you’ve got your drama stuck in my comedy” flavor as Deadpool. This new comic introduces us to Alex Hayden, man of mystery and titular Agent X. He doesn’t know who he is but he ends up collapsing into the arms of Sandi Brandenberg (formerly Deadpool’s office secretary—much of the supporting cast from Deadpool shows up in Agent X), and Sandi takes it as a sign that this amnesiac is really Deadpool come back to life. She enlists the aid of fellow mercenary, the Taskmaster, to get “Alex” back to snuff so he can return to his mercenary life—and Sandi can get her old job back and a steady paycheck.
(If this premise has you wondering why the comic is called Agent X, well: Marvel Comics was known to have some success with any title that had an “X” in it, so the Powers That Be figured calling the book “Agent X”-- even though it wasn’t clear that Alex was a mutant, nor had any relation whatsoever to anybody remotely connected to the X-Men--would be a good way to boost sales. Did I mention that this book lasted 15 issues?)
Anyway, the first issue mainly concerns itself with setting up the cast and the mostly superficial ways that Alex is not just Deadpool with a different outfit. The characters are pretty broad, and to be honest I don’t find Alex Hayden particularly compelling—which isn’t surprising given even he doesn’t know who he is—but because this is mostly a humor comic, I’m willing to go along with the ride as long as the laughs are there. And the laughs are there. Most of it takes the form of some well done “witty banter” type dialogue, but there are definitely some moments that make you snicker such as Taskmaster’s sadistic training session (Alex writes in his journal at one point: “Beginning to suspect TM doesn’t like me. Can’t find foot.”), and the idea that Alex’s first professional job as a mercenary is to rescue escaped zoo animals. Plus, there’s the Hypnotic Mullet of Doom:
The good news is, if you never read Deadpool, then all this works. The bad news is, if you’ve read Deadpool you pretty much finish this issue wondering why they bothered with a brand new character instead of just re-starting Deadpool with a new first issue. But even with that nagging reminder (and fully realizing that Deadpool was cancelled and Agent X is our consolation prize so we might as well suck it up and take what we can get) it’s a fun story, and worth the cover price.
So if I liked Simone’s run on Deadpool, and I liked this first issue of Agent X, why did I not buy anything after this first issue? Was it just an overall fatigue of collecting comics—fund as Agent X is, there isn’t anything particular new about it. Well written though it was, it was still just a slight variation of what I had read several times before. I had been collecting comics for 15 years and at long last I was, on a sub-conscious level, wanting something more, not just more of the same. It wasn’t just this comic that disappointed me—all comics were disappointing. And if I was finding titles I collected for years to be unfulfilling, what chance did a brand new comic stand?
What sunk Agent X for me was the art, which was by a collective called Udon Studios, drawn in the style of certain Japanese Manga1. Now, Manga, like American comics, is a wide and diverse art-form. And just as American comics tend to be stereotyped as nothing but juvenile adventures of cape-wearing muscle-men and anatomically incorrect pin-up girls, so Manga is often stereotyped as constituting of giant robots, sailor-suit-wearing women, where everyone has saucer-sized eyes, exaggerated expressions and an overabundance of speed lines. Now, one would think, being a die-hard comicbook fan that I am, that I would have a large liking and appreciation of Japanese Manga. But I don’t. That stereotype of a certain type of Manga I mentioned above? That was the type of Manga that constituted my first exposure to Manga and it’s a style I’ve never warmed up to. I have read some Manga that is more to my tastes—Taiyō Matsumoto’s No. 5 for example—but, overall, I have as much interest in reading Manga as most people do in reading American superhero comics. (Yes, I expect the Irony Police to be knocking down my door any minute now.)
Since I know nothing of Manga, I can’t tell you what the name of this particular style is, but as I read this issue now, the art gave me the impression that Udon Studios spent too much time playing Streetfighter 2:
(Yes, I realize I just referenced a videogame, that is not Manga, to describe artwork that I am claiming to be drawn in the style of certain Manga. Did I mention I know nothing about Manga?) It’s no wonder I was ready to drop the title so quickly, given my own bias against this style of drawing. If the language and iconography of a medium I loved for 15 years was no longer making me happy, I certainly wasn’t going to be interested in the visual style of something that never appealed to me. Fortunately, the intervening decade has allowed me to be a smidge more open-minded.. While still not to my tastes, I can enjoy Udon's style much more now than back in '03. In particular, this splash page is pretty stunning:
It’s all a matter of preference. I know that the image could not be rendered without the help of a computer program—the coloring, the out-of-focus train in the background, the light streaks are all tell-tale signs that this image was not achieved by hand. But so what? Someone still took the time to create it; whether art is made with a pencil or a computer tablet, it's still art. My 25-year old self might have been snobbish enough to look down upon something so obviously digitally manipulated, but at 36 I like to think I've learned that my tastes are not the sole arbiter of good or bad. (Although, obviously, my opinion counts more than most.)
I’m actually tempted to look around and see if I can find the rest of the series—or at least some of it. You see, Simone left after six or seven issues due to problems with the editor, although she returned for the last three issues to resolve the mystery of who Alex was and his relation to Deadpool.2 I could probably find the issues pretty cheap on eBay. I realize this also says a lot about how I viewed comics ten years ago and how I view them today, but I think I'm going to leave that exploration/rumination for another blog entry.
Next Issue: I ended up writing a lot more about Agent X than I intended, so the musical styling’s of Alan Moore will end up with its own entry. Join me next time when we talk about one of comicbook’s greatest writers and a comic that he had almost nothing to do with, even though his name’s in the title.
1 “Manga,” in case you were wondering, is the Japanese word for “cartoon”, although in America the word has become the catch-all title for the medium. Manga, like American comics, is a 20th century art-form whose origins are far older and, as I mention above, incorporate art and narrative far beyond the cartoonish.
2 If you want to read the interview where Gail Simone discusses how she become a comicbook writer, got the job as the writer for Agent X and why she left the series, just go here: http://redroom.com/member/gail-simone/press/the-gail-simone-dialogues
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