Agents of Atlas #1: “The Golden History” (continued)

Time for more Bizarro Avengers. Hale Gorillaman is a guest at SHIELD headquarters, where Jimmy "Nick who?" Woo's body is being kept alive as a vegetable on life support.

We move ahead a few hours to late evening, when a security guard in a particularly restricted corner of the base hears an intruder approaching. He starts to draw his gun and call for backup, but it turns out it's just Hale. Why he's out of bed and poking around over in this section, of course, is still something he needs an explanation for.

"Agent Hale." Hale is his last name then, not his first name. It's Gorillaman Hale, not Hale Gorillaman. Noted.

Apparently this room isn't a vault or a lab or anything, it's actually just one of the base's entrances. Hmm. On one hand, not being able to go in and out without supervision is to be expected for such a secure facility, but on the other hand, given the amount of pressure they seemed to be putting on Hale to agree to stay here, it does kind of feel like imprisonment. Especially after that debriefing that looked way too much like a prisoner interrogation.

Anyway, since Hale is here by Khanata's request, the guard starts to call him to get clearance for this. Hale calmly assures him that that won't be necessary as he rushes forward and breaks the phone in his hand before the guard can finish dialing. Hmm, looks like Hale might have gotten some of the same bad vibes about this whole investigation that I did. Likely with additional context that the reader doesn't yet know about.

Just then, the door is blasted to shards as the Human Robot kool-aid man's his way in, just like he blew Fu Manchu's base open all those decades ago. This naturally sets off a million alarms and sirens, on top of the guard screaming for reinforcements at the top of his lungs. Hale sighs, lowering his hairy face into his palm, and asks M-11 if it really couldn't have waited one more goddamned minute for Hale to get the door open from the inside instead of alerting the entire facility. M-11 doesn't answer. Hale groans and decides that they're just going to have to deal with the consequences now.

Ah. It seems like Gorillaman, Human Robot, and possibly other superteam veterans had this planned out before SHIELD even called Hale in. Hale was most likely feigning ignorance about Woo, earlier.

Security starts swarming in. Hale tells M-11 to leave the mooks to him, they've already caused enough unnecessary collateral damage as it is. M-11 should just try and get them to the infirmary ASAP while Hale does the suppression fire.

Well, the hornet's nest is well and truly kicked now. Pretty much everyone in the entire base starts arming up and heading down to contain the intruders. Even Dugan is accompanying the no-names while Khanata hurries back to the base from his fieldwork to assist as well, which, hey, even if they're part of some evil Bizarro-HYDRA conspiracy or whatever, I've got to respect them for that much. The telemetry shows them that Gorillaman Hale is in fact one of the "intruders," and that the other one sure does look a lot like that Human Robot character who he used to work with.

One of Dugan's assistants mumbles about how "you can't even trust monsters, these days." Which suggests that there were previous days during which monsters were more trustworthy as a rule than normal people. That is hard for me to make sense of.

Also, on further thought, they seem to be sort of bewildered by M-11 actually appearing in person. Not just that it's attacking, but that they're even seeing it at all. Implying that the Human Robot has been AWOL for quite a long time, possibly even thought to have been destroyed. Noted. Wonder what ended up happening to all the other team members, aside from the ones who aged out of superheroing and retired or died since then?

...speaking of which, I wonder what Hale's aging is like. Gorilla natural lifespans are slightly shorter than human ones on average, and we don't know how old he was when Woo first recruited him. He doesn't seem any frailer or weaker than he was in his prime, though. Is he aging like a gorilla, or aging like a human, or not aging at all? I have no idea what his origin story is, so an extended lifespan may or may not be part of his powerset.

Well, Hale and M-11 reach an intersection where they know the guards will be preparing to flank them. Still reluctant to let the Human Robot with his immense destructive potential off the leash, Hale tells it to pick him up and free up his legs.

That is definitely suppression fire.

...

Since I've already touched on gorilla biology, I think this is a good time to point out that - while it might sound stupid - "being a gorilla" really, legitimately would be a decent superhero powerset. Those things are astoundingly strong even proportionately to their large size, and only slightly less terrifyingly fast. They're not quite as arboreal as the other great ape species, but they're still good enough climbers to participate in your standard superhero urban fight scenes jumping off of rooftops and climbing walls and stuff, and they're faster than those other apes (and most humans) on flat ground. As the panel above demonstrates, they can also still do the monkey thing using their feet as manipulators.

Now, give this creature human intelligence, and some fitness and/or military training to cover its weaknesses. High-performing professional human athletes can outrun a silverback gorilla, by a small MpH margin, but that's a normal gorilla who's spent its life doing normal gorilla things instead of putting itself through rigorous SpecOps training. Think about what kind of armor it could wear. What kind of equipment it could carry. What kind of firearm recoil it could handle.

Yeah, we've pretty much got a respectably powerful street-level superhero, even before adding any other comic book weirdness that Gorillaman might have.

The more I see of Hale's personality, and the more I think about the implications of his ability set, the more I wish that he actually had come back and become a Marvel mainstay alongside the Avengers, Spiderman, and F4. No strong feelings about any of the other Agents of Atlas heroes yet (besides Venus lol), but it does seem like they actually had a cool thing with Gorillaman.

...

Running commentary from the people on the telemetry reports that Hale is using rubber-coated bullets, so while they have a lot of injuries to deal with they haven't lost anyone. Probably the most-less-lethal option Hale could get his hands on that would still get the job done, I suppose. This, along with the implication that Hale doesn't *normally* use rubber bullets, suggests that he doesn't suspect the SHIELD rank-and-file of being secret death cultists or anything, just the higher ups.

Hmm. I do find it a little disappointing that this alleged window into what Marvel could have produced if it went with a totally different roster of characters is reusing the "SHIELD's top brass gets infiltrated by I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-HYDRA" plot. I wish they'd done something really novel and leaned on a bunch of out-of-nowhere worldbuilding that looks like it could have actually been the result of a different version of Marvel creating different confusing, contradictory, market-chasing, retcon-ridden, overcomplicated plotlines for five straight decades. It's not actually that hard to improvise that feel (heck, you could probably stream-of-consciousness it and be fairly convincing), and paced carefully you could really make light of the concept without overwhelming the reader. Oh well.

With the first wave of interlopers subdued, Hale and M-11 are able to make it to the infirmary. Apparently M-11 has some medical modules installed right now, because it's able to take over the functions of Jimmy Woo's life support rig while they remove him. Maybe that's part of M-11's usual loadout, but I kinda don't think so. They probably rigged that up in preparation for this op. And, yeah, the dialogue here definitely supports that reading.

Gorillaman and Human Robot have been working on this for at least two days, which means Jimmy Woo might have even tipped them off before leading his secret team to San Francisco in the first place. Also, the Human Robot *can* talk, apparently, it just never does so on panel. Also, it seems like it was M-11 who filled Hale in on whatever terrible secret it is that spurred them into action, which means that the real inciting incident might have been Woo sending a tip to M-11 with instructions to pass it on.

Heh, I also just now noticed how much M-11 looks like Gort from "The Day the Earth Stood Still." With a little BSG cylon mixed in there as well. It looked a lot clunkier and more "1920's Soviet scifi film" in the flashback sequence. I guess the Human Robot has been receiving further upgrades or modifications over the years, wherever it's been.

The second wave of SHIELD personnel, this one including Dugan and some other officer-looking types, cuts through the door and puts them at gunpoint. If you'll recall, Khanata was the one who was insistent on keeping Woo on life support, and he's not here right now, so these guys might be willing to shoot even if they risk hitting Woo. Dugan tells Hale that if he and his robot friend surrender right now and explain what the hell they even thought they were trying to do here, their service records will earn them a lot of leniency. Dugan may or may not be part of the evil conspiracy himself; he might just be playing dumb for the benefit of his soldiers, or he might actually be in the dark, hard to say at this point. But, before Hale and M-11 have to answer him, an eerie light comes down through the ceiling and all the guards' weapons get yanked out of their hands by an invisible force. A moment later, the infiltrators and their comatose prize start floating upward as well.

This has got to be Marvel Boy (well, more like Marvel Middle Aged Man at this point, I think), using his alien supertech.

Or...actually, maybe it's not HIS supertech so much as him having gotten some friends from back home to come help out:

Heh, nice. Straight-up flying saucer with a straight-up abduction beam. So pure and unapologetic.

Is the implication of this that the Uranians are the ones who have been abducting humans for experiments and turning cows inside out and stuff, if this is their technology? I guess they might not all be friendly.

The ship speeds away across the sky, untrackable. Just as it's flying away, Khanata makes it back to the base (which now has a giant hole ripped in the roof in addition to the door M-11 blew up) and goes over the data. He confirms that that robot was definitely Hale's old coworker M-11, even if it's had some customization since those days. The flying saucer looks like something Marvel Middle Aged Man related, whether he was piloting it himself or not.

More suspiciously, Khanata claims to have not been able to find anything out about any "Atlas Foundation" having even existed, aside from the remaining bits of the ruined building matching some images from the bodycam footage. Yeah, I kind of doubt that, this place had big Atlas statues all over it. Even if those shots were from inside the building rather than outside, it couldn't have been that deep in.

In any case, right now all they can really do is profile the other members of Woo's old super best friends team and try to locate them in the hopes of finding a lead.

They have someone who knows something extra about our Uranian friend. Wonder who that might be?

Speaking of which, we now cut to the saucer's interior, where they've placed the comotose, burned-up wreck of Jimmy Woo into a bacta tank type thing. Someone with a distorted voice - either M-11 finally speaking, or a Uranian who's English isn't great - reports that Woo's vitals have stabilized and his tissues are regenerating. They can't just blindly regenerate his damaged neural pathways, though, so they're going to need to reconstruct those using a brain scan taken earlier. Unfortunately, this means that Woo's memories will be several years out of date. It's the best they can do though; hopefully he already knew enough at that point to help them blow this Atlas thing open.

Hale and "Bob" (who I assume is Marvel Middle Aged Man; we don't get a good look, but it's pretty strongly implied) open the bacta tank, awakening the healthy but partially amnesic Jimmy Woo.

It looks like it's also de-aged him.

He looked his age in the photos and video footage shown at SHIELD. Now he looks the same age he was when they rescued President Eisenhower. That raises a lot of questions that I think probably won't have satisfying answers, but I could be wrong about that.

The issue closes out with some inside-cover text. It's an in-universe villainous monologue that circuitously babbles about fate, reawakenings, circles of karma, and how the true "agents of Atlas" are those who fate favors, and we'll just see if it ends up being the people who call themselves that or the people fighting against the people who call themselves that. It's signed "Mr. Lao." Sigh. At least have your racist Chinese stereotype who hates "the occident" allude to a Chinese mythical figure instead of a Greek one, fucking hell. Unless the Yellow Claw really just was Ayn Rand in disguise the whole time. Hey, it worked for The Shadow's first nemesis, for some value of "worked." The end.


On one hand, this is a really interesting expression of pop-culture history that makes you wonder how things might have gone if Lee, Kirby, etc had just made a few different choices about which assets to recycle. It's well drawn. The dialogue is pretty good, both in terms of being convincing character writing, and in communicating a complicated situation clearly and concisely for the reader. It's technically competent, if not better, and it's premise is inherently intriguing for anyone with an interest in this kind of cultural arcana.

On the other hand, this is also a 2000's Marvel comic.

On balance, it's probably much better than average for its time. Remember, this is just one year before the notorious "Spiderman: One More Day," a couple years after the cringefest that was the Ultimates line, and a couple more years after the crime against humanity known as Marvel Mangaverse. Even if it's much better than those, though, it's not hard to spot some unpleasant common elements. The War On Terror-ish xenophobia in particular. It did rub me the wrong way that the shady, almost-certainly-an-undercover-villain guy was also the only explicit foreigner. The fact that he's from sub-Saharan Africa of all places, and that he's the only black person seen in the comic, well...maybe I'd give it more benefit of the doubt if it hadn't come alongside the unironic 1930's vintage sinophobia (with Woo providing cover as one of the fully assimilated and Americanized "good ones"), but it did (frankly, I'd also be more willing to forgive the silly sinophobia as just an old museum piece if it weren't for the other stuff). There's also the bias in favor of rogue operatives doing secret unaccountable things using the taxpayer-purchased military resources entrusted to them. It looked like the comic was going to subvert that at first, with the sinister framing of Woo and his personal black ops team, but nope, looks like they were actually the good guys, and it's the people reigning them in who are the problem. Etc. Most of it is subtle, relative to its contemporaries, but it's there.

Gorillaman's sympathetic narration helped hook me at the beginning, but I feel like we were starting to lose that as well by the end of the issue. I still do like Hale's concept and overall character, but by the end it was feeling like he needed a little more to him. Which, to be fair, the subsequent issues might have given him, but that's outside the scope of this review.

Overall? I had a little bit of fun reading it, and I learned some interesting comics esoterica while researching it, but I don't think I'd call it "good."