Fear Agent #31 Review from Dark Horse Comics

Note to self: If I ever create a race of robots to do my bidding, don’t encase their brains in a jar on top. All it takes is one seriously pissed off space Texan with a Bowie knife to turn my creation into so much worthless scrap metal. And let me tell you, Heathrow Huston is one seriously pissed-off space Texan.

Fear Agent #31 — part four out of five of the Out of Step arch — is two stories in one, switching between flashbacks of Huston’s past and an all-out assault on the Tetaldians and their overlords, the Jellybrains. Throughout the issue, you come to understand exactly why Huston is so pissed off; his family and personal history wasn’t that great, full of alcoholism, a broken family, failure, secrets and recriminations. Just when his life did turn around, an alien invasion snuffed it out. As Huston’s assault progresses, he uses that pain as motivation to great effect. And the action scenes have everything you could ask for: rockets, rayguns, giant talking brain monsters, lizardmen, robots, space Texans attacking said robots with a Bowie knife…

It’s obvious that the Fear Agent creative team knows what they’re doing and their talent really shows through. They’ve made a perfect balance between the flashbacks and the current action and have written a story that is easy to jump into, even though the story arch is almost finished. The illustrations are superb and the story is told very efficiently — there’s not a lot of speech bubbles cluttering up the pages, allowing that superb art to shine.

As someone who only recently got back into reading comics with D.C.’s New 52 event, it’s books like Fear Agent that leave me wondering why I ever got out of the hobby in the first place. I can promise you I’ll be making a stop at my local store to look for Fear Agent back issues.

Departing trivia: Did you know that the sound of a disembodied brain being squished under the boot of a pissed-off space Texan is “GQWSHH?”