5 out of 5

Sweet Barbara Bush, this is the best action comic I’ve read in years.  It might be the best action whatever I’ve whatevered in years.  And it’s not dumb, and it’s actually pretty funny, and there weren’t any eye-rolling attempts at commentary wedged on – nor did it commit any ignorant stereotype offenses, as far as I noticed – and it even managed to drop a twist in there that somehow worked even though I’d already glanced at the last page and had the twist spoiled.

Action Man is every aspect of every awesome action flick you’ve experienced, with all the fluff carved off and written with just enough genre awareness to be able to play it cool.

AM is another James Bond, super agent elite, working for Her Majesty in some secret agent capacity.  Alas, Action Man is dead.  His successor is Ian Noble, young, punny… and not nearly as elite.  Although its not fully explained why yet, Ian – who did serve under AM – was chosen as his successor, much to the consternation of fellow agent Salmons, and maybe partially to the consternation of others, including his boss, Director Mercy, as the shared opinion is that he’s not quite up to snuff to own the title.  In one of writer John Barber’s several slight shifts to this formula – because the green agent becoming #1 certainly isn’t new – Ian is, by no means, bad at his job.  He’s just ridiculously un-covert (there’s a funny running gag with him literally jumping into frays, often through windows), and a errs toward “let’s see if this works” over careful planning.  Ah, but the madcap spy he succeeds despite his madcapness isn’t new either, is it?  And so Barber adds one more level of nuance by riddling Noble with the same doubts as others; he’s very human, in other words.

The high action antics, as illustrated by Paolo Villanelli and with nicely done bold foreground over blended background colors by John-Paul Bove, are always choreographed incredibly clearly, and Villanelli’s character models feel like they move appropriately for the action, not over-acting for splash pages.  You could say his still isn’t particularly fancy, but its a skill to make the page incredibly engaging without crazy camera angles or some particular stylistic quirk.  So, yes, the art is primarily “simple” in that Paolo keeps his main characters the focus and gives his backgrounds just enough detailing to ground us in the space, but it feels like a great match to the zooming pace, and the openness of the panels is what makes Bove’s colors work so well.

While it’s sort of a bummer that this gets wrapped up in the Revolution crossover, because Barber is co-scripting that, and because this title started under the banner of leading into revolution, it doesn’t come across as hi-jacked.  I suppose I’m just more bummed out to think we have to wait for more of this supremo action stuff.

So the basic setup and characterizations found in Action Man will read like a billion other spy tales, but Barber knows how to ground silly stuff and build it up into something fun.  With AM he tapped into an equation made of those same grounding components, and produces ultimate results with it.