By: Too many to list—check out the review.
The Story: You ever get the feeling your mother’s holding something back from you?
The Review: Back in the olden days, whenever that was, heroes were the good guys and villains the bad, and hardly ever, if not never, did the twain meet. Nowadays, members from both classes come in degrees, which makes getting a handle on them a little harder, but definitely a lot more interesting. As Gail Simone’s superb Secret Six shows, we get no end of intrigue trying to figure out just where in the scale of humanity a character falls.
So it makes perfect sense that the Agents, who each want to use their powers for personal redemption, have no greater enemy than Iron Maiden, a woman who has absolutely no interest in redeeming herself. Nick Spencer portrays her as a woman seemingly incapable of remorse, with an almost monstrously finite level of affection. Whatever connection she had to husband Dynamo, it clearly does not extend to his values or loved ones, as we see in grisly detail.
Her callous actions force you to wonder if she feels pain at all. When she charges Bill Henry that, “My husband is dead. You killed him,” her tone has no chill to indicate an emotional stake in the statement, but the barren bluntness of fact. Upon disposing of him, I. Maiden actually smiles as she says, “Give my love to Len.” This is not the curse of a vengeful widow; this is the ironic remark of a villain, an idle curse for her enemy to join his comrade.
So by all appearances, Colleen’s conclusions about her mother seem correct. A woman with such little regard for human attachment could never find satisfaction in domestic felicity alone. That said, we have an interesting implication that murder doesn’t necessarily satisfy the Maiden either. Rather, the act and challenge of killing occupies her soul in a way homemaking can’t. In Colleen’s words, Maiden does what she does because “You were bored, weren’t you?”
In spite of these insights and the tough exterior with which Colleen delivers them, we can plainly see in her increasingly pained interrogation (“Go on, then. Tell me I’m wrong… Tell me you were forced to… Tell me something. Tell me anything.”) a desperation to grasp at any pearl of genuine love her mother might have for her. Like the final nail in the coffin, Maiden denies her with the kind of mockery we’ve come to expect: “You always did cry too much, girl.”
We mustn’t forget to note a suspiciously excised scene in the issue, where Colleen makes Toby use the Menthor helmet to coerce her mother into revealing “the numbers.” Their substance don’t get revealed to us—not even Toby, due to the helmet’s mind-screwing side-effects. Their relevance is known only to Colleen and Maiden, who hisses the numbers are “everything [Colleen’s] scheming, traitorous heart ever desired.” We know our redheaded agent has secrets unknown even to her superiors; perhaps this all leads to the opening scenes of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1, with Colleen having a Marie Antoinette moment surrounded by rioters.
Mike Grell, Val Staples, Nick Dragotta, and Lee Loughridge do no wrong on their remarkably accurate period sequences, which are all too brief. Dan McDaid works the bulk of the issue, and manages to outdo even Dan Panosian in delivering the silliest, least convincing art you can imagine for a title this serious. Think of the spastic style of animation Cartoon Network had in the nineties, and you’ve got a reasonably close approximation of McDaid’s work.
Conclusion: Inappropriate art and sluggish pacing gets in the way of what would’ve otherwise been a compelling and commendably original mother-daughter tale.
Grade: B-
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – Only in comics would you get a foxy chick delivering, with utterly sincere dismay, the line, “But Len, what will we do? I’m still a wanted woman, technically speaking!” Love it.
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Conclusion