By Rick Remender & Tony Moore (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 987-1-59307-764-8
Once upon a time science fiction was hard, fast all-action wrapped in impossible ideas, but over the years films like Star Wars and TV shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica slowly ameliorated, crossbred and bastardised the form until it became simple window-dressing for cop stories and westerns and war yarns…
Rick Remender clearly loves the old-fashioned, wide-eyed wonder stuff too, and in 2005 brought back strictly impossible, mind-bending action-packed Amazing Stories to remind us all of what we’d been missing.
Fear Agent debuted from Image Comics and ran for eleven issues before folding and being subsequently picked up by Dark Horse in 2007. This slim, scintillating tome collects the introductory 4-issue story-arc which introduced dissolute, Mark Twain-spouting, alcoholic Texan freelance pest-control operative Heath Huston: the original Man With A Past But No Future…
It opens as a weary, hungry space-trucker pulls into Glentbin deep-space service station and discovers to his horror that the place is overrun with an entirely unacceptable kind of vermin, before the scene shifts to planet Frazterga where independent contractor Huston is on a bug-hunt with his mouth dry, his head screaming and his bank-account empty.
He’s climbing a really big mountain with a massive hangover and it’s real hard to make a living when the pencil-pushers of the Quintala Convention daily redefine the parameters of the Killable Alien Rating, but here in this last-ditch, last-chance filthy backwater Huston is going to make some money if it kills him.
Heath’s been hired to retrieve terraforming technology filched from colonists by the stupid, stupid ape-creatures living in the hills, but after a decidedly well-planned resistance from the hairy beasts he soon realises he’s been shafted yet again. The big dumb monkeys are using the stolen parts to build a spaceship…
After another blockbusting battle Huston discovers the burly pro-simians have been psionically enslaved by a marooned Class A entity. Officially, he should back off and leave it be, but he’s ticked, determined to get paid and has never liked aliens anyway…
The catastrophic explosion and riotous aftermath don’t go down too well with his clients either, and when he returns to his sentient spaceship Annie it’s empty-handed and with the Mayor’s blood on his gauntlets.
Down to their last wisps of fuel, the exterminator and his rather stroppy ship head for nearby Glentbin Station and the dubious hope that they can hock or trade something for fuel and food…
As they coast on fumes towards the service facility a call comes in from Thomas Yorke of the United Systems government. He wants to hire the reprobate – maybe that should be “needs to hireâ€â€¦
They are old not-friends but Glentbin has gone offline and the authorities suspect some kind of infestation. If there is and Huston cleans it up there’s a 10,000 Uni-cred fee in it…
The satellite mall is empty and the legendary “too quietâ€, but the smell more than makes up for it. Fearing the worst, Huston starts helping himself to supplies when he finds the ghastly remains of a patron and realises the entire place has been taken over by Feeders…
Fighting a wave of tentacles coming from everywhere, the terrified spacer blasts his way into a water pipe and is flushed into the station’s main cistern. Floating there is the only survivor of the infestation – a feisty, surly warp scientist named Mara…
She’s never seen the beasts before but Heath has. Feeders are a flesh-eating horror that were only stopped by blowing up any planet they landed on and, when his sodden new friend says they were sent to Glentbin by the Dressite Empire, Huston realises that Earth’s greatest enemy are planning on finishing the job they started decades ago: the last time they tried to wipe out mankind and legendary Fear Agents only just stopped them…
Blasting through the hull of the station, the grizzled veteran admits to being the only survivor of that august cadre of warriors, even as he and Mara spy on the station from the relative security of hard vacuum.
And that’s when he learns the Dressites have used the station to dispatch the unstoppable Feeder larvae to Earth in a convoy of deadly Trojan Horse ships…
Frantic, frustrated and unable to broadcast a warning, the Terrans bleed off cached fuel supplies into Annie – who hates Mara on sight – and try to reach Earth first. This is exactly what the Dressites want: they’ve supercharged the warp fuel and expect their old enemy to go up in a blaze of burning hell…
They have however not reckoned on the astounding intellect of the AI, who contrives to ride the explosive warp-wave and dumps the fugitives alive but lost on a strange alien world where they’re soon embroiled in an apocalyptic civil and religious war between creatures of flesh and monsters of metal. Moreover, as the campaign proceeds and Huston frets that the Feeders are inexorably closing on planet Earth, he realises that they are lost not just in space but also time…
Given a chance to save his homeworld years before any greedy marauding ETs ever attacked it, Huston embarks on a crazy raid with his fleshy allies that goes horribly, irretrievably wrong.
And then he’s killed.
To Be Continued (yes, really)…
With a copious sketchbook section from artist Tony Moore, this powerfully character-driven, fast, furious, frantic, thrilling, manic and exceedingly clever balls-to-the-wall science fiction is in the best tradition of 2000AD, and has all the adrenalin-fuelled fun any fantasy aficionado could want.
Fear Agent was a breath of fresh air when it came out and remains one of very best cosmic comics experiences around. If you’re old enough, Sentient enough and Earthling enough, this is a series you must see before you die, have your brain-engrams recorded and are cloned into a new form unable to enjoy terrific fiction feasts.
© 2006, 2007 Rick Remender & Tony Moore. All rights reserved. All characters and distinctive likenesses are ™ Rick Remender & Tony Moore.