Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle Reviews
Fear Agent #30 (Out of Step #3 of 5)
Dark Horse Comics
Remender, Hawthorne, Moore, Lucas & Loughridge
As Fear Agent winds down to its final issue we are told everything in issue #30. You see, all along Remender has had Heath Huston on adventures here and there with the common theme of anger, drunkenness, revenge, luck and, lately, death of everyone he knows. Well, we come to find out that it's all connected. Every last little morsel that has happened to Heath in the past twenty-nine issues has been related. There's a key villain at work here and Heath is finally told and boy is he pissed. While the issue itself is mostly a series of flashbacks with explanations wrapped around them, the brilliance is the architecture of this long underlining plot. I loved it, but I could see it losing some folks along the way.
Heath is the last human in the universe and many of the other races are also extinct. Heath has lost his ship and is floating in space. Things probably couldn't be worse. Until he gets picked up by a few scavengers known as Zerin – they basically look like walking crocodiles. You would think Heath's been rescued, but really the Zerin tell Heath the truth behind all of his problems. The Zerin hope Heath will join them in the final battle to set everything right by, you guessed it, time travel.
If you like time travel and clones and overall science fiction mayhem then this issue bubbles over with those concepts. How many alternate timelines and time jumps have we already seen in this series? Well, here's the thing about time travel if you keep jumping a little further back than before you keep messing up what you just fixed. Or you keep fixing what someone else just messed up. It's endless and this series promises one final attempt. It's fantastically thought out and everything Remender lays out here maps out perfectly with the previous issues.
When you consider the comic has three people working the pencils I'd say the art is terrific. The key to the issue is capturing the flashbacks. While you could make a case that this would be easy to do because you can reference (or reuse) artwork from previous issues, the issue manages to give a flashback feel to the art and takes a different look at the key scenes. I thought the art was very good. The issue plays off of the character's emotions well. One negative criticism would be that the faces were inked way too heavy in the back half of the book. It stands out from the first half of the book too much.
Heath is about to go to war. This issue is the big setup to the finale and a final punch in the gut as we all learn just who's been pulling the strings along the way. It's an amazingly structured story. Add in that you get a terrific backup story about Heath by Barta and Buniak and you have excellent bang for your buck. I definitely recommend this issue and this series.
4.5 out of 5 Geek Goggles
