Nick Spencer has really skyrocketed up my list of writers to follow the last few months. Existence 2.0 never did it for me back in 2009, but Morning Glories made me a believer, and the owner of Evil Squirrel Comics up in Rogers Park recommended that I pick up his first issue of this new T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents series. There are a number of baseline expectations that issue #1 meets, but Spencer and his artist Cafu pull the whole mysterious super-team with seedy military-industrial roots thing off with finesse, and they’ve made this old Tower Comics property work in a modern context.
You can pretty much guess from the first pages that this book is going to address questionable motivations in the corporate/command hierarchy that’s running everything. The heroes are noble, and the people behind the scenes pulling the strings are ostensibly not. It’s a story we’ve seen a thousand times before, but the ending (don’t worry, no spoilers here) pivots off of a compelling final note. Until the characters start getting more fleshed out, it’s tough to say where all of this is going, but as far as first issues go, Spencer’s got my $3.99 for another installment or two.