EDITOR’S NOTE: If spoiled, the Director will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

I’m going to get the unpleasantness out of the way up front and recommend that, if you’re interested in reading Mark Millar’s and Dave Gibbons’s The Secret Service, you just skip the first issue of and think about picking it up when the entire story is collected into a trade. Because there’s a glimmer of a decent and potentially fun idea in this issue which might make it eventually worth reading, but it is wrapped up here in a gaggle of thoroughly unlikable characters, derivative plot points, and shock value slapstick violence. It is like watching an episode of Springer where Jerry hands out .44 Magnums; there is a certain level of entertainment value to the spectacle, but of the kind you would never admit to strangers.

The high concept behind this book is: what if James Bond was a real thing in the real world? Which is fine as these things go, but it put into stark relief the kind of comic books that Mark Millar writes when it’s something he owns: books that can be distilled down to the kind of elevator pitch one would make to Michael Bay, possibly while sharing a couple of rails.

Let’s go down the list: