For years, I've been expressing my amazement at Marvel's bizarre policy of publishing miniseries with minor characters and no big-name creators, shoving them out there with no publicity, and then watching in amazement as every single one fails.

But it seems Marvel might finally be taking the hint.  By using the Annihilation crossover as a springboard, Marvel have actually persuaded people to buy Ronan and Super-Skrull comics in respectable quantities.  This week we have Agents of Atlas, a miniseries which doesn't have any promotional stunts on its side, but has been pounding the news websites with interviews to raise its profile.

The publicity is undoubtedly a good move, because characters don't come much more obscure than this.  Agents of Atlas has all the hallmarks of a continuity geek's pet project.  "Atlas" was one of the names Marvel used in the 1950s.  This series is a sequel to What If...? #9, a 1970s comic which showed a bunch of characters from that period joining forces as a sort of proto-Avengers team.  We're talking about people like the original Marvel Boy and Gorilla-Man.

So if you're a fan of the Human Robot, you won't want to miss this series.  Admittedly, it's more likely that you have no strong views on the Human Robot, if indeed you've ever heard of him.  But you still might want to give the series a look.  Jeff Parker's script is walking a tightrope between playing with the largely-forgotten characters, and trying to produce a story that works on its own merits.  His solution is to do a secret-history conspiracy story, which starts from the assumption that nobody knows or cares about these characters.

Agents of Atlas certainly isn't targetting a nostalgia audience (virtually nobody currently reading comics actually bought these characters the first time round).  It seems to be aimed more at the fan with an interest in the quirky backwaters of Marvel continuity.  And the book has the right style for that audience.  It doesn't play the characters for laughs, or at least, it doesn't do so explicitly.  Instead, it just puts them in the modern Marvel Universe, plays them straight - or at least deadpan - and allows them to be suitably weird and anachronistic.

The plot is a touch convoluted, and with the best will in the world, I don't think anybody's ever going to persuade me that Gorilla-Man is an interesting character worthy of a full-scale revival.  But the book does seem to be enjoying itself, and a genuine passion for the concept comes across. 

Rating: B+

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