Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter (or possibly multiple chapter for this one) of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
In our last installment we were told about the new evil Op-Center. I’m guessing we’ll meet the team this week, but to keep these intro segments genuine I haven’t read it yet.
I still maintain that this is the wrong book to be doing the evil opposite storyline. Our introduction to the team wasn’t the best. They barely won, and that was after all the internal squabbling and questionable morality we saw on display, plus we were told their first mission was a failure. So we’ve only seen their second assignment, and they barely succeeded.
It would have been better to save this for a few books, get the team’s mojo together, have some more definite victories, and then have a counterpoint to the good Op-Center with Commie Op-Center. Make it a real challenge for a team who finally showed they had what it takes to stop the villains, rather than a group we’ve only seen as incompetent thus far, unable to work together or sometimes even get along, even during a crisis. It’s supposed to be a crisis response team, but the real crisis was them. And a bombing, but other people not tied to Op-Center did a better job dealing with that for most of the book.
Let’s see what we can learn about Commie Op-Center this chapter. Yes, I’m still calling them that.
Chapter Two: Saturday, 10:30 AM, Moscow
And we still don’t know if they’re using local time or America Op-Center time.
Well now the author is just trying to curry my favor.
We are introduced to Keith Fields-Hutton, a British intelligence agent working for D16. Apparently that’s a real group. I found this old Time magazine article (as in before I was born) discussing the former MI-6 working with young Russian. Here they’re using a comic book company to smuggle information into and out of Russia. They even use the merch. Apparently the comic company is doing quite well on it’s own with the stories and art by Russian plants, but they use the profits to help charities. The government using money from a semi-fake business enterprise to help poor people is probably the most unrealistic thing in this franchise thus far.
We see that the deaths from the prologue are mostly likely important to this story, but that’s odd given that at least one of them supported Dogin. Covertly hidden in the stories are reports that something is going on in St. Petersburg, where Commie Op-Center is being put together, so Fields-Hutton’s agent (funny for this site, said agent is named Leon–I wonder if we’ll see a Jake before this is over?) has found out about the operation but not exactly what it is, just that the setting up is going on. Easier for me to believe is that the spies are doing a better job integrating secret spy information into stories that sound interesting (some sci-fi story involving space slavers) than modern day American comic writers is integrating their blunt preaching into their works. And we’re talking a country right now heading into Big Brother territory with limited free speech and cameras all over the place. See, we warned you the Teletubbies were a problem!
I’ve always told people the Teletubbies were evil!
For those of you new around here, Leon is on the right and not a spy (as far as we know), and that’s Max on the left. Jake wasn’t in this comic.
Where will this lead? Our next chapter is going to Washington, DC, to meet up with our regular band. Oh joy.
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