Throw Your Hat At Her And Die: Velvet #1 Review

When reading the first issue of Velvet, the new spy comic written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Steve Epting, you can almost hear the creators saying, “You know what would be fucking awesome? If Miss Moneypenny was actually the baddest motherfucker who ever walked in or out of M’s office. Now pass that thing over here before it goes out, willya?”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Velvet is a spy comic set back in 1973, when the Cold War was running full blast, men were men, women were secretaries, and spies were dapper motherfuckers with laser wristwatches and cars that turned into submarines.

Which is, of course, utter bullshit. Everybody knows that there’s no such thing as James Bond – hell, even James Bond knows it, based on the relatively gadgetless Daniel Craig version we’ve had for the past few years. At this point, we can be pretty confident that real spies are either faceless geeks sucking up Internet traffic (Hi, NSA!) or large-jugged Russians with crappy Facebook cover identities. And besides: real spies work for real governments, which means hierarchy, bureaucracy and internal politics… and they know that you never fuck around with sharks with frikkin’ lasers when you can just blow your enemy’s head off with a shotgun.

So James Bond sure is fun, but he doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense in the real world if you stop to think about it longer that a minute or two. And Ed Brubaker clearly has stopped to think about it, because Velvet takes the world of James Bond, plugs it somewhat realistically into the real world of 1973, and turns things on their head by making Moneypenny the one that you really need to be concerned about.

And it gives us a meaty mystery: who killed X-14… and just who the hell is Velvet Templeton?

ARC-7 Agent X-14 (Because the Double-0 designation is just dumb, amirite?), while escaping from a wily infiltration and assassination comprised of, well, shooting a guy in the face, is prevented from a clean getaway by the well-known spy trick of, well, getting shot in the face. Back at headquarters, the team (and Director Manning’s assistant, Velvet Templeton) are convinced that the murder was an inside job, because X agents are too badass to be taken in by anybody… even though we are told that Velvet has seduced damn near every X-level agent at one time or another. As the official investigation continues, Velvet, who has a photographic memory, does her own digging, finding that X-14 has a missing day on his expense report on a prior job. Meanwhile, Sgt. Roberts’ internal investigation has shown that the apparent culprit is Frank Lancaster, a retired former agent who it seems Velvet also had a special relationship with. Velvet, unwilling to believe that Lancaster might be the killer, goes to one of Lancaster’s old safe houses, only to find that the real killer had been there first. But Velvet isn’t the last one there, as Roberts and a team of agents burst in to find her over Lancaster’s body. And when they try to arrest her, well, they find out that she is most definitely not just the Director’s secretary.

So we are clearly meant to see the James Bond nods and winks in this comic book – you don’t give agents weird numeric designations, obvious licenses to kill, and cars with gimmicks hooked to the cigarette lighter without expecting the reader to hum the James Bond, “Dun de-de DUN, DUN” in their heads. But that alone would be kind of boring and totally derivative, and Brubaker knows it. So what he does is kind of cool: he shoehorns that kind of organization into a far more realistic world. These spies are womanizers because they know that there’s a decent chance they’ll wind up dead when they go to work every day. The agents have a license to kill, but instead of going undercover and trying to infiltrate SPECTRE with a bon mot and a game of baccarat, they shoot a guy in the face and run away. There’s talk of funding for the organization, and internal protocols, and it all takes that familiar world of super spies and grounds it, which makes everything feel weightier than some dude in a tux trying to bang someone named Pussy Galore or Holly Goodhead or something… not that “Velvet Templeton” is much of an improvement, as monikers go.

And it is that main character that gives this series its primary reason to tune back in for future issues… not that there are a lot of answers about her in this particular issue. Brubaker does a good job putting an air of mystery around the protagonist, making it clear that despite being a secretary (and being 1973, that’s the term that gets chucked around), she has the skills to play these international super spies, the background to have had a close relationship with the former main field agent, and the training to subdue an entire room full of armed agents ready for trouble. So Brubaker gives us a hell of a mystery around Velvet, but we spend most of this issue seeing her reading files and attending meetings. The mystery makes the read worthwhile, but it sets up more spectacular in future issues than it delivers in this one.

When it comes to Steve Epting’s art, the first thing I want to say is: that Director sonofabitch is Sean Connery. It’s a nice Easter Egg in a story about James Bond-style spies. But beyond that, his art is much as it was when he worked with Brubaker on Captain America: realistic and detailed without a whole bunch of fussy crosshatching or detail lines, with expressive faces and people who look like people. He makes an interesting choice when it comes to Velvet: he makes her attractive, but not blisteringly hot like a Bong Babe; there are some panels and angles where Epting makes Velvet look hard as opposed to a fuck magnet. Epting makes a point of moving the camera around to keep thing dynamic, which is key in keeping the energy up in a book where there are pages of meetings and reading files.

Velvet is a pretty solid book. It does a good job in setting up a couple of mysteries, and building a reality where you could actually believe that people like James Bond are running around making the world safe for something or other. But most importantly, it turns Miss Moneypenny into a badass more believably than even Skyfall did. After all: if the woman jockeying the desk for M could actually kick that much ass? She would have to keep it a secret. Otherwise, he’d have her ass in America, faking a background on Facebook. And she’s interesting enough that I want to see where she learned to bust ass like that.

If you’ve got any love for James Bond at all, this one’s worth a look.