Review: Fear Agent
Got an infestation? A little pest problem? Of the large, dangerous, extraterrestrial kind? Who ya gonna call?
Heath Huston is your go-to guy. He may be a whiskey-drenched Texan redneck but he sure knows how to kill all manner of aggressive aliens...
He should: he's a veteran of the war that wiped out nearly all life on Earth. Ten years ago his father and son were both killed when two warring races brought their conflict to his backyard. He led a group of survivors fighting back against the invaders. His band called themselves the 'Fear Agents', paying the aliens back some of the terror visited upon them.
Between the Tetaldians (organic brains in robot bodies) and the Dressites (green slime creatures in cybernetic suits), both toting hi-tech weaponry, it was a wonder anyone did come out of it alive, but finally the nightmare came to an end. Unfortunately one of the costs of victory was Huston's relationship with his wife.
Deciding to make good use of his skills, he hires himself out around the galaxy as a specialist exterminator, rambling about in his rocketship with its computer Annie his only companion. But, little does he know, more momentous events still lie in store for him...
Fear Agent by writer Rick Remender and artists Tony Moore, Mike Manley, Jerome Opeña and Francesco Francavilla is something of a lowball: at first glance, a straight-up action-fuelled shoot-em-up zinger with a chisel-jawed macho dude systematically zapping, burning, freezing and blowing up a whole Encyclopedia Galactica of alien lifeforms, with an accompanying explosive rainbow of different-coloured exotic body fluids...
But this is no one-note ballad; stick with the story and deeper, more complex elements begin to arise. Sometimes bad things happen to good people for no particular reason (OK, all the time, actually); but sometimes those 'good people' are not as innocent as they may at first appear to be, and what looks like random catastrophe is in fact the result of bad karma coming back to bite you on the ass.
The narrative is illustrated with joyous expressive energy by the artists, whose styles mesh together seamlessly. The wide range of bizarre creatures are rendered with a bold enthusiasm. There is a somewhat grungy tone, but then this is a very rough-and-ready dystopia with a far from perfect, less-than-polished main character. Huston is a hard-fighting, hard-drinking alpha male with a somewhat relaxed attitude to keeping his rocketship spick'n'span (as noted by the main female lead when she first comes aboard: "Is that vomit on the ceiling?")
There is some pretty gory violence perpetrated upon human victims here also, graphically depicted, so please take note.
Huston teams up with a band of like-minded individuals and the story takes a wider perspective... but their voyage forward into a bright new future is haunted by the echoes of a dark, bitter past...
Zak Webber
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