It’s #adventurecomicsmonth and while my first thoughts turn to Indiana Jones-type escapades, I am going to stretch the definition here to include spy comics and political thrillers. I mean, Alan seems to be including them in his reads, so why not?

I’ve always enjoyed spy movies and political thrillers; having been raised on a healthy diet of 1980s action flicks, they were a natural fit. But I haven’t read a ton of spy novels in my lifetime, and maybe only one or two political thrillers. The same can be said for comics, at least those that are independent from the main superhero universes. Back when I did my 80 Years of DC Comics miniseries, I covered an old King Faraday story, a Nemesis backup from The Brave and the Bold., and a then-current issue of Grayson. They were all really solid stories, and with the DC app, I may follow up on that one day.

But in recent years, there have been more spy/adventure/political thriller comics coming from independent publishers than I previously noticed. Or maybe there always have been and I’m finally noticing them. At any rate, these are both miniseries that are independent from superheroes and their continuity, so the risk of buying them off the stands is pretty low. If I like them, I can file them away and pull them out again at some point. If not, I can find a way to sell or donate or even trash them.

Red Atlantis is a five-issue miniseries published by Afterschock Comics, a publisher that I’ve seen a few good comics from over the years. Written by Stephanie Phillips with art by Robert Carey, the premise is that on the day of the 2020 Presidential Election, a number of violent crimes happen seemingly out of nowhere committed by people who look possessed in some way. One of the people who gets involved in the FBI’s investigation behind the events is Miriam, who was adopted from Russia as a child and has some sort of connection to something called “Red Atlantis.” We find out that this was a Soviet version of the CIA’s Project MK Ultra, except it may have worked.

As far as thrillers where an “ordinary” person is somehow caught up in an international conspiracy, this is a good one. Miriam is a likeable protagonist, the FBI agents are the sort of “neutral good” (read: competent and not jerks) that you hope they will be, and a number of the twists the story takes are well thought-out. The art is also great–Robert Carey gives us action and tension while making his characters very human. I guess the only problem that I have with it is the last issue. It’s a five-issue miniseries and for all the groundwork that Phillips laid, it could have gone for six. We get a conclusion when the book finishes and it is logical based on everything we’d been reading for five issues; however, it also feels like the end of a two-hour pilot episode for an ongoing television series. I wanted to see more of Miriam and how she was going to deal with the aftermath of the story as well as whether or not Red Atlantis remains a threat.

The Dead Hand is a post-Cold War thriller that centers around a town in the middle of the Russian frontier that appears to be the epitome of an American suburb. Carter Carlson, an American spy who worked extensively through the Cold War, lives there along with a number of other people who know that the town has an enormous secret: it’s a feint that is set up to keep a possibly deadly AI construct from doing something catastrophic. In other words, they’re all there to keep the Soviet version of Skynet in check.

Naturally, over the course of the series, things start to happen that are throwing off that balance. A “random” hiker (who is not “random”) shows up in the town, having trekked through the frontier because there are no roads in or out of the town; and one of the teenagers in the town who has known no other place in the world because she was born there, begins to ask questions about where they are and something that she’s heard whispers about: The Dead Hand. Over the course of the six issues, things unravel and Carter races against time to make sure the world doesn’t end.

I remember buying this off the rack when it came out a few years ago based on the solicits in Previews, and at the time, it suffered from a lot of problems that occur when you try to read a modern comic issue by issue: I would get the next issue and couldn’t remember what happened in the previous one. Part of that is my memory being shot as I get older; part of it is that this really is meant to be read in one sitting and belongs in a graphic novel format instead. Reading it all the way through, it’s a solid spy/political thriller that calls to mind similar stories of the 1970s and 1980s but uses the post-Cold War, current-day political climate very well.

But both of these series aren’t the types that I would come back to over and over. They were certainly enjoyable and enjoyable on a reread but I have this feeling that they’d both wind up spending a lot of time sitting in a shortbox before I decided to offload them.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Sell or Donate.