Agent 13 - Acolytes Of Darkness [1990] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Agent 13 - Acolytes Of Darkness [1990]

This is the second of two Agent 13 comics published by role playing game company TSR, coming two years after the 1988 release THE MIDNIGHT AVENGER. The character first appeared in novels by Flint Dille and David Marconi, with Dille and Buzz Dixon adapting the prose to comics and Dan Spiegle supplying the artwork.

And yeah, the Spiegle part is the only real reason I own these two books, purchased fairly cheap a few years after the fact. I'm a big fan of his work, and it seemed worth it to try out a big chunk of it (108 pages over the two books) given a larger and more deluxe treatment.

The concept itself is pretty much a collection of genre clichés. It's late 1930s, the lead-up to WWII, and it turns out the Axis powers are secretly being controlled by a mysterious ancient organization known as The Brotherhood. An agent trained by The Brotherhood, you can probably guess his number, turns on them and enlists some agents on a globe-trotting war to foil their plans, including regularly punching them with his "13" ring, marking them as his victims. So there are bits of Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Phantom and other pulp influences.

All that said, it's readable enough. Kind of scattershot, there seem to be a lot of things missing that are probably explained in the novel, but it does the job of setting up various exotic locales and set pieces for Spiegle to come in and do his classic adventure strip style renderings for. There are a few dozen Spiegle comics I'd recommend you read first, but if you have all of those, this is worth picking up.

Because this is TSR this also includes a bound-in game, which is just a map of the world as the board, some cardboard squares to cut out for tokens and six pages of instructions which are great if you suffer from insomnia.

The incongruous cover is by Paul Gulacy, I'm sure hoping the James Bond people would come across it in the bookstore and hire him.