Writer: Mark Millar / Penciller: Matteo Scalera / Colour Artist: Giovanna Niro / Letterer: Clem Robbins / Millarworld via Image Comics
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4th January 2022 (Released 1st December 2021) Review by Brian Bullen.
The Pitch: The world's greatest secret agent has six months to live. Does he die quietly in a hospital bed, or does he make up for a lifetime of bad decisions? He's been propping up an unfair system for over forty years. Now he knows where all the bodies are buried and has nothing to lose when he turns his guns on everyone who ever made a buck creating the mess we're in right now.
Sir Roland King was once the spy of spies. All over the world he toppled regimes and fought enemies of the state, served Queen and Country and made James Bond look like an amateur. From the very start of this comic, you can tell that is going to be one hell of a ride. The opening pages throw us straight into an over-the-top action sequence, and we see Roland Kings in his heyday at the peak of his career in a gun battle pushed to the limits in the way that only comics can. If I had to compare it to one of the Bonds, it would be Roger Moore, given how Millar punctuates the action with humour in the opening sequence. Throughout the wars, King’s family have been there on the frontlines and even played a pivotal role in the formation of the SAS. But the world is changing: Money rules everything and what once made a man a true gentleman has gone. Wealth is all that has any substance in society now. King’s ailing heath is already starting to play on his mind. It all comes to a head when he collapses and wakes up in hospital with a prognosis of 6 months to live. For someone that has always seen himself as invincible, this hits him hard. Back at the club and drowning his sorrows he is once again witness to disrespectful men in positions of power and in a moment of either madness or clarity, he decides that in these next 6 months he is going to try and take out as many of these types of people he can, to make amends for his part in letting them get to such powerful positions in the first place. One last mission…
WE RARELY SEE SPIES OUTLIVE THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS
I really enjoyed this book. From the start, I felt it was going to push the boundaries of already established story ideas, going that one step further, into extravagance. It’s hard to not see that James Bond is the inspiration for the character in his younger days, and this gives a jolt of adrenaline when you realise the older version of King appears to be based on Pierce Brosnan as he is now. The story does slow down a little when it jumps to the modern-day as we see King ageing, his regrets, losses and some amount of guilt for his part in making the world the way it is now. The end-of-life crisis he suffers as a result of his illness pushes him to question his time spent following orders and making the rich and powerful more so. I think this is an interesting twist on the spy genre - a genre whose characters we rarely get to see outlive the consequences of their actions, or the changes they’re affected by.
KING’S RAGE IS NOT ONLY AT THE VILLAINS OF THE PIECE BUT AT THE LIFE HE MAY HAVE MISSED
Scalera’s art on this issue is strong. The action sequences show the speed and motion of the combat and offer a very fluid reading experience. The difference in King’s posture and poise from his younger days to now and then from the modern scenes to post-collapse is executed well, conveying King having to face his mortality for the first time. The final scenes where he lets loose, the red filling the panels surely indicating his rage at not only these men but perhaps also at what he missed out on in his life so that people like these could prosper are done beautifully. As with all the new Millarworld / Netflix titles, you can see the seeds of the series or film this will become. As a live-action series and with the right people I think it would be excellent. With Brosnan serving as a clear inspiration for the physicality of King and rumoured to be interested in the project, this could be a terrific movie. After all, Brosnan has a bit of experience when it comes to the spy game.
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