Fear Agent vol. 2: My War

I really liked the style and energy that writer Rick Remender brought to the adventures of hard-living, harder-drinking sci-fi jack-of-all-trades Heath Huston in the first volume of this series.  It also had a real light touch as Heath barrelled from certain death in one set of circumstances to even more certain death in a completely different set. 

Unfortunately, things turn into a bit of a slog in the second volume.  While Remender still writes his hero with gusto, his refusal to allow the man to actually succeed at something really weighs things down.  Every time Heath gets trapped in a corner, be it when he’s having his brain probed by angry space jellyfish or after he’s been thrown in jail for successfully changing the universe via time travel, we never see him turn the situation to his advantage or outsmart his opponents (I’ll admit that might be a bit of a stretch for the man… but it’d still be interesting to see).  Essentially, he escapes from said corner thanks to Remender writing something on the level of “And then he escaped,” in the caption boxes. 

I still like the world and characters that are on display here, and artist Jerome Opena does a great job visualizing all of the alien life forms and planets we get to see in the story. I just want the man to show us that he’s not born to lose all the time.  You can only grind a man down so far before he becomes powder, or before the readers start to lose interest.