Velvet Deluxe Edition

An oversized hardcover of the best action spy story ever published in comic form! Fantastic story, fantastic art, from the team that brought us "The Winter Soldier".What more could one possibly ask for? Maybe a sequel!

Velvet Deluxe Hardcover  collects the 15-issue opening story for this characterThis is a superb new spy series from Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting, set in the 1970s, but with plenty of flashbacks covering the period back to the war, as we see an Anglo-American - “Allied Reconnaissance Commission” - super-spy organisation busy fighting the bad guys. I say super-spy, but we only see one piece of advanced technology, deployed in issue #2. The organisation is based in London, but as it is written and illustrated by Americans (as far as I know), occasionally some Americanisms (or at least references) creep in, but so minor as to be almost un-noticeable, and considering that they manage to get the Bricklayer’s Arms railway station into one panel (which is now long gone, but was there in the period of the story) which was just across the road from one of my local libraries, and whose site I have been looking for, I can forgive them anything.The story opens with the ARC’s top agent being assassinated, and the evidence pointing to an ex-agent as the killer. However, the boss’s secretary, Velvet Templeton, a lady of a certain age, has been going over the various reports with a fine-tooth comb as they cross her desk on their way to her boss, and she spots a discrepancy here and there, leading her to suspect someone has been framed. When she goes to investigate, she finds the suspect dead, and the investigating team burst in just in time to find her leaning over the body… What they (and we) don’t know, until people start flying through windows, is that Miss Moneypenny (for it is fairly obvious who she and the first dead agent are based on) is the Moneypenny of “Skyfall”, and soon we are off on a Bond adventure that takes us across 1970s Europe as Velvet follows the trail looking for clues to who is behind the plot, and her background as a field agent is slowly filled in as we go. Eventually the trail leads to a figure from her past, and another major twist in the tale…This really is a superb story, set in a believable past, and playing with the world of Ian Fleming’s novels, rather than the films – though there are the odd references to those, as when Velvet is looking for a cigarette lighter in a car –“Not that one! That’s not the lighter!”“Is this a work car?”We don’t know what the button is for, but we certainly know what a work car is.As the story continues, we discover more and more clues, and layers of deception and corruption, though as we approach the finale, the introduction of a certain hotel in Washington did give me a jolt, for though I was a teenager at the time the story is set, I had forgotten just what was going on in America back then.I certainly look forward to seeing more adventures from this character in the future.