‘U.S.Agent #3’ (review)

Written by Christopher Priest
Art by Georges Jeanty
Published by Marvel Comics

After last issue’s confusion, I’m … still confused. But a little less so.

We find out why John Walker was fired as the U.S.Agent.

It’s one of those scenarios where he may not have been doing the right thing, but he was trying to do the better thing in a terrible situation seen in our actual world.

And the plot thickens further as Walker’s old partner and former Bucky, Lemar Hoskins aka Battlestar, is called into action to try persuading Walker to stand down in that West Virginia town where our story began.

We see Manning again, presented as someone who ideas of militant Black nationalism put him on the warpath against, well, his own people.

A flashback to a Harlem street scene shows the depths of his malevolence. That scene is cut against the present-day him playing European classical piano, with Katie Walker sitting in his lap and injecting him with another dose of super serum.

Leave it to Christopher Priest to make something messy and loaded while also not really telling you what it’s about or where it’s going.

The wild part is that a Black man named Manning in the Marvel Universe is loaded enough, as that’s the same surname as the Army soldier who becomes the original Deathlok.

Is Priest making a link to that story of a Black man from Detroit who is killed in action and reanimated as a cyborg? The cyborg killing machine who regains his humanity and turns his fight on the evil corporate and military regime that used to control him?

The Manning of our current story certainly sees himself as a free man while his brothers are asleep in their servitude. His self-hating liberation comes even stronger in an absolutely brutal fight with Battlestar that Georges Jeanty draws with every bit of visceral, bone-cracking impact.

This entry in John Walker’s story is more straightforward, the action more propulsive, and the subject matter more provocative.

By issue’s end, the floor literally gives way from under Walker’s feet, and a classically comic book betrayal sets us up for the next issue. Which, as the penultimate piece of the series, should give us the big picture to assemble.