Agents of Atlas #1 “The Golden History”

This review was commissioned by @krinsbez.


I knew that the Agents of Atlas were one of Marvel Comics' more obscure superteams, but their background is more interesting than I realized before reading up on it now. Back before it was called Marvel Comics, Atlas Comics was a low-key publisher that mostly stuck to its own lanes to avoid competing with the ascendant Detective Comics. They had tried to do their own superhero lines, with the original "Captain America" and "The Human Torch" runs having been on the shelves during World War II and found some financial success. Unfortunately, when children's television came along and the comic book market shrank, Superman and Batman just ate them for dinner. So, Atlas went back to doing comedy and horror comics and staying out of DC's way.

It wasn't until the early nineteen sixties when they rebranded as Marvel and attracted some new talent (like the now-legendary Lee and Kirby team) that they were able to take part of the superhero clay back from DC again. The original runs of "Spiderman" and "The Fantastic Four" (the latter of which even salvaged and reimagined their old Human Torch character) were wildly successful, and paved the way for the return of Captain America alongside a bunch of new heroes in the "Avengers" line. The rest, of course, is history.

So, what is "Agents of Atlas?" Back when it was scrambling against DC over a shrinking market in the postwar years, Atlas Comics had a bunch of superheroes who were eventually just forgotten. A couple, like the aforementioned Captain America and Human Torch, were brought back at the start of the Marvel era, but many others remained stuck in unsold pages gathering dust in the back of Marvel's filing cabinets. Then, in 1978, Marvel ran one of their "what if?" one-offs that asked a Doylistic question rather than the usual Watsonian one. "What if Captain America and Human Torch were left fallow, Spiderman and the Avengers never happened, and instead we had relaunched our cape comics using a superteam of good old Venus, Marvel Boy, Namora, Gorillaman, the Human Robot, and Jimmy Woo?"

Who the fuck even are any of the characters I just listed there? I have no idea. And, that's pretty much the entire point of Agents of Atlas.

After their initial one-shot, the cheekily named Agents of Atlas had some cheekily timed appearances over the decades, in Marvel plotlines that involved parallel earths (keeping the meta joke strong). It wasn't until 2006 that they actually got serialized. It only ran from 2006-7, but still, it's more attention than they ever got before. The first issue of this 2006 run is the comic I will be reading today.

I like the bizarro-Avengers design of the cover. Definitely gets the point across.


Our story starts with a backstory. In early 1958, President Eisenhower was captured by a yellow peril caricature who goes by the supervillain alias Yellow Claw. FBI special agent Jimmy Woo had the most experience dealing with the Claw, and being Chinese American himself he was uniquely suited to making this story arc slightly less racist, so the FBI granted him special powers to assemble a team and lead a rescue mission. Woo - who seems to fill the niche that Nick Fury was later invented to occupy, all the way down to being specialized in racism mitigation - starts assembling the atlases.

Known heroes Marvel Boy and Venus sign on right away. Namora and the Sub-Mariner couldn't pull themselves away from their marine duties, but they were able to give Woo a useful artifact they'd scavenged from the ocean floor; the lost M-11 military android prototype, the legendary "human robot." They wouldn't normally be able to get it working again in time for an urgent mission, but well, you know Marvel Boy with those Uranian technomagic powers of his, he gets the Human Robot up and running in no time.

Also, I remember one of those names now. Namora was that lusty mermaid princess in Marvel Mangaverse, with the evil brother. Well, this version of her can only be more dignified than that one.

The narrator starts speaking in a more personal manner now, as he relates how he himself was recruited into the squad. He never found out how Jimmy Woo learned of his existence in the first place. Just that local heroine Jann of the Jungle helped Woo track him to his lonely rainforest lair, and that Woo convinced him that he could have a better life with them. Gorillaman had long ago given up on ever being treated like a human, but Woo managed to give him hope and snap him out of his pessimism.

So, with the squad all filled out, Jimmy Woo led them to spearhead the attack on Yellow Peril's lair in Mongolia in advance of the conventional forces.

"G-Men." I guess they didn't adopt the "Agents of Atlas" title until later, when they committed to a longterm organization.

The issue title, "The Golden History," is another cute little meta joke. Referring to the golden age of superheroes (1930's-1950's) when these characters originally debuted in their own standalone comic titles.

This next page is...well. You can forgive a lot when you consider that the writer and artist are deliberately trying to evoke the feel of an early 1950's comic book, including the warts, but this WAS created in 2006. So, take both these factors into account, and judge the following panel as you deem appropriate.

Remember, with Namora not having joined yet, this is the only female member of the team.

I had already suspected that Venus was Atlas Comics' attempt at an ersatz Wonder Woman, just from her name and outfit, but I didn't suspect she would be this bad an attempt at one. Like, fucking hell, can you imagine what the decades of discourse and controversy about comic book women would have looked like with this lady as one of the original Avengers, let alone replacing the only woman in DC's Big Three?

Also, I'm sorry, but drawing Jimmy Woo like an actual Asian person doesn't make up for the Yellow Claw soldiers looking like literal monkey-people. If you were to put these guys next to Gorillaman without any text, I'd never assume I was looking at anything besides a gorilla officer leading his baboon troops into battle for the glory of United Primatamorpha. Which...okay, maybe these guys actually are genetically engineered monkey soldiers grown in the villain's lab, but I don't think so.

Personally, being charitable, the problems with Venus seem to be very deeply embedded in her concept, so I can see the 2006 creators feeling like they just had to bite the bullet there. The way the Mongolian soldiers are drawn, though, is a purely stylistic thing that's external to the script and plot. Drawing them as the Asian equivalent of minstrel show puppets was an active decision the artist made, and that they absolutely didn't have to make.

Sigh...

Anyway, with the outer defences flattened and the enemy infantry taking a vacay to bonetown, Jimmy orders the Human Robot to blast open the main bunker's door. The hard part is likely still ahead of them. Jimmy reminds the team that in addition to Yellow Peril's own technomagical inventions, he's recently joined forces with a maniacal former SS special research division officer. Yes, that's right, it's Fritz Voltsmann; the man whose name Marvel forgot before inventing Baron Strucker! Still, Yellow Peril and Bizarro-Strucker couldn't be expecting the array of powers that the attackers are bringing to bear either, so it's going to be a dangerous minefield of unknowns for both sides, not just theirs. I guess that's a positive enough attitude to have about this!

Human Robot breaks them in, and soon they find themselves face to face with Yellow Peril, Voltsmann von Notstrucker, and...some other bad guy lady whose name isn't important I guess.

"Occidental" agent, eh? Is Peril calling Jimmy Woo a race traitor in some kind of weird way? I think that's what he's doing there. Because Asians living on their own continent think of themselves as "Asians" with a shared identity. I am a dragon, you are now etc etc. Whatever. Voltsmann summons some shadow spectres to attack the good guys with. Bullets and beatings do nothing to ghosts even while they're tearing you apart, and - as Voltsmann gleefully informs them - these ones have been dead and bodiless too long to be effected by Venus' carnal allure.

Luckily, ghosts can only manipulate the physical world themselves using shadows. Marvel Boy has just finished dealing with the enemy's air support, and flies in just in the nic of time to flood the room with bright light from devices built into his outfit. Flashbang beats shadow monsters, and consequently Uranian technology beats nazi necromancy.

With their last-ditch defence neutralized, the villain duo (trio?) have lost. Voltsmann is dismayed to learn that Yellow Peril and the other lady (it's his niece, apparently. Lol, literally Fu Manchu and his daughter with the serial numbers filed off) have actually already escaped and are aboard their getaway plane. They're using holographic projections of themselves to trick both the attackers, and the dumb nazi who they hoodwinked into staying back to slow the attackers down for a few extra minutes. Heh, well played Yellow Peril and niece. Before terminating the holoprojection, Peril uses it to inform the attackers that the President is alive and well in the fortress, but that there's also a self-destruct timed to go off in just a couple minutes, so they'd better spend that time finding Eisenhower instead trying to chase the plane. Once again, well played. Love a competent baddie, even if he comes with unfortunate baggage.

So, with little choice but to do as Peril recommended, the Human Robot keeps breaking down walls until they luck into the room President Eisenhower is in.

Yes, of course Yellow Peril's fortress is also a geisha sex palace. Why would you ever expect it to not also be that? I guess him letting prisoners actually use his geisha sex palace as long as they're already there instead of indulging in the pointless torture-obsession that villains of Yellow Peril's namesake usually got saddled with is a surprising twist, but it's not exactly an interesting one.

Anyway, they grabbed the president and escaped in the Atlasmobile with the base exploding behind them. Aww, they even evacuated the girls too, I'm actually pleasantly surprised! Gorillaman narrates that after that highly successful operation, they became a formal unit and performed several other critical missions over the next six months. After that though...something happened. Someone high up in the State Department ordered their team disbanded, and their mission reports classified. Gorillaman isn't sure why; the official statement was that America "wasn't ready yet," but that never seemed like a sufficient explanation.

Since then, Gorillaman has been independent up until just last year (what is the date supposed to be now? Unclear. The disbanding could have been just a couple of years before the comic's present, or it could have been decades), when he was recruited to do some work for the newer SHIELD agency. So, SHIELD exists in this setting even though it postdates the Atlas/Marvel point of departure, noted. Anyway, working for SHIELD felt good for Gorillaman. Almost like old times, though not the same without Woo's leadership. So, now that he's finished his story, he has some questions of his own.

Damn. Gorillaman's been captured by someone, and the interrogation was successful.

...or, no, actually not! Apparently this is just a super secret SHIELD debriefing, and Gorillaman finds all these multiple layers of policy-mandated secrecy between himself and his coworkers to be tiresome. Heh, that was a clever rug pull, even if it feels a little artificial. Anyway, the exploits of Jimmy Woo's old superteam were only just now declassified to SHIELD, and they wanted to get a complete firsthand account of that initial mission from the only surviving team member on hand. Bureaucracy amirite?

The REASON that this was just declassified to SHIELD (or at least, certain SHIELD personnel) is because of a situation that just came to light the other day. So, now that Gorillaman (or "Hale" as the others now call him. Guess he's a former human who got turned into a gorilla, going by the mundane name) has told the story, SHIELD desk jockey Dugan tells him what just happened that made them need to hear it. Jimmy Woo transferred from the FBI to SHIELD not long after the latter's foundation, and over the years was promoted to its upper management. He kept everything he did before this quiet, of course; he didn't like that Uncle Sam buried and classified everything about his old team, but his loyalty remained absolute.

Or so they thought.

Turns out that in recent years, Woo has been surreptitiously building his own personal black ops team out of frustrated or probationary SHIELD operatives. No one's sure what he was having them do, or why. They only found out 48 hours ago, after Woo personally accompanied his rogue cell to raid some kind of shady organization called the Atlas Foundation (huh, so that wasn't ever the name of Woo's original superteam, surprising) based in San Francisco, and faceplanted right into a TPK. Explosion. Fire. Building torn right the fuck open. The remains of Woo and his secret renegades were barely recognizable, but still recognizable.

So. That's why those old files have been opened up now.

Also, if it's been a little over forty years since then, that would place the story's present as somewhere in the late nineties or early two thousands. So, just slightly before this comic's real world publication date. The main body of this story isn't going to be a period piece, unless "five years ago" counts as that.

As for WHY Jimmy Woo and Hale Gorillaman haven't spoken in so long despite both being connected to the same agency again, apparently that's down to something called an "eagle directive." In order to both keep the secrets and to protect national hero Woo from getting embroiled in revenge schemes or political violence that wouldn't otherwise target him, they both had to follow this special interagency directive to not associate with one another, at least while on the US government's payroll. I...kind of have trouble buying that, but it's unconvincing in exactly the same way as, eg, superheroes all needing to have secret identities, and that's the kind of thing you just need to suspend disbelief for as part of the genre's entry fee, so I won't harp on it.

Ah, correction! They now explain that Woo is technically still alive, it turns out, but the emphasis is on "technically." Whoever left the photo next to his body also stopped the bleeding and hooked it up to an oxygen tank. He's braindead though, so the fact that his heart and lungs are still working doesn't actually help much. Whoever did this, they sure put a lot of effort into it. They were also able to restore a little bit of helmet-cam footage from one of Woo's followers, which is strange, because a rogue agency like this wouldn't normally take incriminating field footage at all. Anyway, Dugan shows Hale the footage in the hopes of him seeing something that could give them a clue, either about what the hell Woo was doing or who took him out.

The footage answers one side-question right off the bat.

The raid on the Atlas Foundation seems to have been the culmination of the entire secret project, and Woo was sure that their criminal actions would all be pardoned in light of what they performed them to uncover. Them wearing helmet cams definitely make sense then; this is the one operation that they absolutely DID want to get on film.

Also, the footage reveals that the Atlas Foundation has a big statue of Atlas carrying the world on his back in front of their HQ. And they're based in Western California. Is this a dig at the Ayn Rand Institute? I think it might be. Heh.

They infiltrate the building. Unfortunately, with only bits of the footage being recoverable, it's hard to understand what they're examining or talking about. The name "Temujin" is spoken while they examine some kind of historical artifact or pseudo-archaic inscription. Temujin being the birth name of Ghengis Khan. Oh, and we're told that the Atlas Foundation building was in Chinatown.

I guess we're going to keep the already-stale-by-the-late-fifties flavor of racism into the comic's modern timeframe. All the way down to early 2000's San Fran's Chinatown having the same kind of evil secret societies hidden in it that 1930's San Fran's Chinatown had contemporary pulp authors put in it.

God this is tiresome. Again, this was written in 2006. Written AND SET in 2006, or close to it. You can't even make the "we're writing a pastiche of 1950's era comics" excuse anymore.

As the footage bits flicker onward, Woo's group seems to find some kind of magical doohicky, and then get ambushed by an overwhelming enemy force that the video is too distorted to see in detail.

The last bit they get is Woo trying to get a radio signal out to SHIELD, telling them to bring a strike team to this location immediately. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to send it before an explosion filled the space he was occupying.

That's all they have. Gorillaman Hale is still unable to discern any clues that SHIELD hasn't already picked up on. Hale asks if they can take him to visit Woo in the medical section. They tell him that he's not going to get much out of such a visit, but still, Hale insists.

As they bring him over there, Hale strikes up conversation with the other interviewer besides Dugan, who he apparently doesn't already know. Special Agent Derek Khanata is the one leading this investigation, and he seems pleased when Hale notices his tattoo and recognizes him as an ethnic Wakandan. I guess that's yet another thing from later Marvel lore that's being backported into the Atlasverse. Anyway, they get to Woo's ICU, and it's not any prettier than they made it sound.

Khanata regretfully tells them that no, even Wakandan medicine isn't going to be able to fix this. But still. He wants the body alive at least until they can get to the bottom of this. He can't quite articulate why, but he thinks they should.

...

Medical Ethics? Who's that, some B-lister working out of SHIELD Nebraska? What have they got to do with this investigation?"

On top of the obvious, it seems kinda suspicious to me that the bad guy inexplicably put a lot of effort into keeping Woo alive and braindead, and now Khanata is kinda doing the same thing. Hmm.

...

Anyway, they ask Hale to stick around at this base for at least the next few days' worth of investigation. The elderly gorillaman agrees, looking sadly at the vegetable of his old commander and friend.


I'll cut it here for now. There'll probably be one, maybe two, more parts to this review.