The Activity #1

Written by Nathan Edmondson
Art by Mitch Gerads

I loved Greg Rucka's Queen & Country (which I was admittedly late to discover). I also got into the TV show The Unit for a while.  This new comic (I'm not sure if it's a mini-series or an on-going; Image is pretty bad about telling us things like that) fills the gap that those two forms of entertainment has left.

The Activity is about a super-secretive group of operatives recruited from various military and intelligence organizations in the American government.  The book opens with them executing a perfect snatch-and-grab of someone we assume is a Mexican drug lord.

The team returns to their home base, where we learn that they recently lost a member, before they are sent to Rome for a new mission, with their new replacement.  The mission is pretty straightforward - they have to cover the tracks of a CIA operative who had to abandon his cover by burning down his office and scrubbing his car - but it allows Edmondson space to introduce the characters a little, and establish the book's parameters.

There is some question as to the loyalty of the new member, dubbed Fiddler in typical, annoying code-name speak.  Other than that, we are given next to no information about what this team really does, or who their masters are.  What is clear though, is that this is going to be a very cool comic.

I like Gerads's art a great deal.  He handles complex action scenes, like the one in the Mexican restaurant, very well, and differentiates the characters nicely.  Edmondson has proven his ability to write compelling spy-based comics (read Who Is Jake Ellis?), and I feel that this comic is already heads above his work on Grifter at DC.  Check this out.