T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #10 – Review

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.”

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #9 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: You know what they say: beware a redheaded woman with assassin’s credentials.

The Review: You can always count on Nick Spencer to deliver an engaging, enjoyable read, even if the actual substance of the writing isn’t always what it should be.  That’s not to imply this Iron Maiden story arc has been superfluous or anything, but with this arc decompressed to the max, it gets a little harder to remember why you’re invested in this story with every passing issue.  The events in themselves work and rarely fail to garner your interest, but the sluggish pacing often defeats whatever excitement the story generates.

The culprits can only be the flashback sequences, which serve strictly as expositional vehicles.  And by far it’s the 60s “back-up” feature that takes up the most time and space for the least value.  While Spencer is to be congratulated for channeling that Silver Age style and continuity with accuracy, the material has for a while become less cute and more tiresome, especially here, where it reveals almost nothing new or useful to the story.

Even the 80s sequence, which usually plays a pretty big role in the issue, seems unusually slow and redundant.  Since we already knew the original Dynamo would break a deal to free his wife and daughter, and any such deal requires a hefty price, we also already knew Len would be the one to pay it.  His final epistle to Iron Maiden is predictably touching, but gives us a poor gauge of their love, as the letter mostly reveals her ball-busting (“…there’s no use yelling at me, Red.”  “I know you never thought I was the brightest man to walk the earth…”) attitude.

While we have every indication that I. Maiden was truly in love with Dynamo, we can also safely conclude he may have been the only individual for whom she had any real feeling.  Just look at her taking her sweet time painting her lips while the girls she collected on her payroll get mowed down.  Keep in mind she also abandoned Colleen at some point, possibly implying any affection for her daughter was tangentially derived from that for her husband.