A Couple of Major League Yobbos: The Secret Service #5 Review

Editor’s Note: Spoilers Galore? I must be dreaming.

When I reviewed Mark Millar’s and Dave Gibbon’s The Secret Service #1 back in April, well, let’s say that I wasn’t impressed. I was unimpressed enough to put the issue, and the series, on my list of biggest comics disappointments of last year. And that first issue was even more disappointing in retrospect; in a year where Sam Mendes made Skyfall, which wasn’t just a good James Bond movie, but was simply a good movie, Millar’s snark-filled, ultra-violent re-envisioning of James Bond as some kind of dickish football hooligan with a mad-on for the chavs or twats or poofs or whatever the hell the English call douchebags became not only unnecessary, but also obviously small-minded and petty.

But hey: that first issue was nine months ago. And I suppose my initial impressions might have been a mistake; after all, I can think of at least one other mistake I could have made nine months ago that I would not only be regretting today, but doing my level best to pretend never happened and if it did, pretending that it in no way applied to me.

So while I did read The Secret Service #2, #3 and #4 and saw nothing there that would make me change my initial impression of the book, I figured I’d check in with the fifth and penultimate issue to really look to see if enough had turned around to recommend it in time for you to get up to speed for the big finale in a couple of months.

Short answer? Nah. While Millar seems to have veered away from the overt lifting his protagonist Gary from Grant Morrison’s character of Dane in The Invisibles, The Secret Service #5 is still a combination of the most adolescent of revenge fantasies, combined with what seems to be a scathing indictment of genre fans and their priorities in life. And when I say “genre fans,” well, if you’re reading a comics Web site and therefore probably have a stack of longboxes in your home? That’s you and me, chief.

The issue opens with Gary following through on his decision to convince his mother’s boyfriend to perhaps behave a little more considerately towards her via the use of extreme violence. Boyfriend Darren calls in his drinking buddies, who make a convincing go of being able to beat the living shit out of Gary before Gary produces a bit of spy tech that paralyzes said drinking buddies long enough for him to glass them into submission. Gary’s secret agent uncle Jack, proud of Gary’s ability to beat on the defenseless, helps Gary put his mom up in an apartment, and then takes Gary on a mission to seduce the girlfriend of the Big Bad, who it turns out is a geeky Internet billionaire who has decided to wipe out most of the human race to save us from global warming, and therefore is trying to save all his nerd idols from the apocalypse – Ridley Scott in this issue – by kidnapping them by force. Then things go wrong.

This issue breaks into roughly two parts: Gary’s ascension into adulthood via his trial by combat against Darren and his yobbo or boot or lift or whatever the English call asshole buddies and Gary’s acceptance of familial responsibilities, and the advancing of billionaire James Arnold’s plot to wipe out most of the human race. And each is just simplistic and anticlimactic, if not downright insulting.

First off, seeing Jack accept Gary as an equal as a result of tuning up a bunch of guys is just fucking strange. Where the rubber hits the road, this sequence amounts to a kid with a big gun and a get out of jail free card beating up some unarmed defenseless assholes. It’s almost an anti-catharsis; everyone likes seeing mouthy, abusive cocksuckers take a beating, but doing it by rendering them completely unable to defend themselves is less a triumph over bullying than a celebration of more effective bullying. Seriously: making someone powerless, abusing them and telling them that if they tell anyone about it, you’ll come back and kill them sounds like every fucking day of my junior high school experience. It’s about the opposite of empowering, and vaguely a bummer that the best revenge Millar could imagine for a trained secret agent facing off against punters or knackers or cuppas or whatever the English call bullies is to have a bigger gun and pull rank. As adolescent revenge fantasies go, it’s less Three O’Clock High and more Columbine, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Further, the revelation that Jack finds Gary an equal because he shows a willingness to take care of his mother is so obvious it carries next to no impact. First off, Gary’s mother hasn’t been presented as being all that much more sympathetic than the pricks he just spent a few pages tuning up, so seeing her get a happy ending like this really didn’t mean all that much to me. Second, to paraphrase Chris Rock: Gary’s taking care of his family? That’s what you’re supposed to do; what do you want, a cookie? I get that this is meant to be a heartwarming moment that shows Gary has grown up, but it’s not like he tithed half his check to support Mother Teresa here.

And then there’s the villain. He’s a socially maladjusted geek who wears genre t-shirts and who’s willing to wipe out the human race so long as his favorite geek icons survive for his own personal amusement. Sure, I get that this is supposed to be Bill Gates – Gibbons’s art makes it pretty damn clear that that’s who we’re dealing with here – and I don’t know what Millar’s intention was here for sure, but I took this guy to be an extrapolation as to what Millar thinks any hardcore geek would do given access to a hundred billion dollars: kidnap their genre heroes for their own shits and giggles and to hell with the rest of the world. And look: I am not the biggest genre geek in the world, although as a guy running a comics Web site on his own dime for no money I probably rank higher than many, but I found this characterization to be really kind of offensive. And maybe this is on purpose; after all, the James Bond ouvre of villains is packed chock-a-block with racial and sexual stereotypes, so maybe this is Millar’s way of subtly commenting on that tendency in a way that will hit home with its target audience, but it’s not like the rest of this story has been a shining example of subtlety. So I want to give Millar at least some benefit of the doubt here, but it’s hard when at the surface level, it seems like Millar is shitting on geeks. You know, the people buying his comic books, seeing his movies and who therefore bought his house for him.

The one unimpeachable high point of this issue is Dave Gibbons’s art. Sure, all his facial expressions look like variations of other ones he’s done before (Arnold is a hair part away from being Nite Owl), but they are all expressive, with Gibbons’s standard mix of medium and fine lines. His storytelling and panel layout are impeccably clear, with his action choreography making total sense within the spaces he’s created. His violence is convincing and suitably bloody for a “what if James Bond was real?” story, and it’s safe to say that if you’re a fan of his art, you’ll like it here.

Look, I am not a complete idiot. I get that Millar is trying to make some kind of commentary on James Bond stories, and that he might be using offensive stereotypes of geeks and cops answerable to no one to hammer home the absurdities of those stories. However, just because I understand what he might be trying to do doesn’t mean that I think he’s doing it well. The surface extremities of the story completely overwhelm any subtle satire he might be going for here. Instead what we get is a story about some bullying assholes going after a geek so stereotypical it feels like Millar is taking a direct dump on those of us who buy his books. If the goal is to show how unlikeable James Bond would be in the real world, The Secret Service has accomplished it… but it means we’re reading a story about some really unlikeable people. It didn’t work for me at the beginning, and it’s still not working for me. Skip it.