Written by Christopher Priest
Art by Georges Jeanty
Published by Marvel Comics
I said in my previous review of this five-part series that issue No. 4 will be the one where all of Priest’s threads would start to come together.
And they are.
Kate Walker, former U.S.Agent John Walker’s sister, is hopped up on some temporary super-serum. She also may be suffering a psychotic break because she disabled a fuel cell in a rural West Virginia town where S.H.I.E.L.D. has one of their top-secret-super-classifieds under wraps.
We watch John learn that Kate is enmeshed with the new U.S.Agent – something we already knew. But we didn’t know that the skinny businessman April “Saint” Manning wears a fake mustache when he’s juiced up in his gear that makes him look like The Comedian from Watchmen.
Or that the U.S.Agent position has been privatized and sold off to Manning.
That can’t be good news.
But we also see how Kate and Manning met, and where her own thinking may not be as blame-it-on-the-fuel-cells as her brother hopes.
John makes his way back to that old S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier that his sister stole, standing on the wing of an old crop duster plane like Indiana Jo
Both of them think Kate is about to wipe out the entire town of Ephraim, West Virginia. Both think she’s gone insane, or at least too far. But both of them likely are playing the wrong hand about the why.
Looking forward to hearing more from Kate, who barely appears in the current action. (I was gonna call it the present, but the framing interview with town local Smokey reminds me this all already happened.)
Just as we’re about to get some U.S.Agent-on-U.S.Agent action, something takes a bite out of that biplane. Something, let’s say, kaijumperous.
The finale’s about to be a real slammer!
