These Mexican drug cartel illustrations by Steve McNiven are great. The captions are great too: “A Tijuana farmer known as the Stewmaker and allied with a Sinaloa subsidiary disposed of his victims’ bodies in vats of lye”.
“This all started when Matthew Vaughn and I were talking about ‘Casino Royale’ a couple of years back in the pub between breaks on ‘Kick-Ass,’” the writer told CBR. “We loved the movie, but wondered why they didn’t do all the stuff where he learned how tobe James Bond. We’ve both got a couple of friends in special forces, both here and in the US, and even the real life training, without any artistic license, is really incredible set-piece stuff. If you ramp it up a little, it makes for some incredible scenes in a comic and in a movie. ‘The Secret Service’ is about a number of things, but one of the central thrusts is about a young, wayward hoodie kid from North London learning how to be James Bond. There’s a great story about Terence Young, the director of ‘Dr. No’ and the guy who really established the tone and look of the movie Bond we all understand. He liked Connery, but felt he was a bit crumpled and rough around the edges and so took him under his wing and turned him into the gentleman he needed for the role. He took him to his tailor, his barber, casinos and all the best restaurants. He taught him how to order the best wine and how to engage in the kind of well-read chatter James Bond would be able to handle as an ex (well, expelled) Etonian. I guess it was like ‘My Fair Lady’ in a way, but mixing this together with counter-terrorism training really seemed fun to us and become the spine of this project.”
Of course, now that those ideas have rolled into a specific story, Millar is beginning to realize just how potent the team-up at the heart of “Secret Service” is for him. “When I looked at the art and saw this very distinguished older guy taking a very rough around the edges younger guy under his wing and turning him into something cool, I realized it looked like me and Dave in a strange way,” he laughed. “The older, dark haired guy trying to make something of this kid and trying to turn him into something decent.
“This education of a 21st Century super-spy forms the structure of the story. I can’t give too much away because Matthew Vaughn and I co-conceived the thing with Dave, and Vaughn is literally right now writing the screenplay of the movie, so we’re on a non-disclosure agreement for a little while yet. But basically, if I had to say anything else about it, I would say that this is our version of S.H.I.E.L.D. or U.N.C.L.E. or any of those brilliant super-spy concepts, but seen through that skewed perspective we brought to superheroes in ‘Kick-Ass.’ It feels very, very fresh. I don’t think there’s ever been a comic like this and all three of us are very excited about it. I’ve wanted to work with Dave since I was sixteen (the letter I sent him was published on CBR, recently), so it had to be something big”. (via)
The supervillain Nemesis blows up a building in Tokyo, killing a SWAT team, and later kills a police inspector. In Washington, D.C., the FBI informs metro police Chief Inspector Blake Morrow that Nemesis is targeting him next. Nemesis soon hijacks Air Force One over the District of Columbia, taking the United States president hostage and crashing the plane, killing hundreds.
Nemesis tells the story of Matt Anderson, whose father had committed suicide after Officer Blake Morrow tried to imprison the father for hunting runaway teenagers with his rich friends. Anderson travelled the world to learn the ways of crime, hoping to fulfil his mother’s dying wish to have Morrow killed.
Nemesis kills twenty-thousand people at the Pentagon using poison gas, allowing Morrow and his aide de camp Stuart to survive in order to taunt Morrow about the inspector’s projected March 12 death. Local police eventually capture Nemesis, who claims he allowed himself to be caught. Nemesis breaks out of prison, killing scores of guards and freeing the inmates, and then blowing it up. He kidnaps Morrow’s children, forcing Morrow to reveal family secrets: his wife had an affair; his son is gay; and his daughter had a secret abortion. Nemesis releases the children but Morrow’s daughter has been impregnated by his son, with her womb rigged to collapse if an abortion is attempted, preventing her from ever again having children. An enraged Morrow eventually believes he has discovered Nemesis’ hideout, and arrives there with a police team only to find it is a trap. The house explodes, knocking Morrow unconscious. When Morrow awakens, a taunting Nemesis reveals that Stuart has been working for Nemesis for the past eight years. Nemesis kills Stuart, and tells Morrow that his “Matthew Anderson” story was made up: He is simply rich and bored, creating death and havoc for his own amusement.
Nemesis then reveals they are in the White House’s Oval Office, where Morrow’s wife Peggy and the U.S. president have bombs strapped to their chests. The staff and Secret Service agents have all been killed, and Nemesis gives Morrow a detonator and tells him he has thirty seconds to kill either the president or his wife. With four seconds left, the president steps-up to Nemesis and tells Morrow to detonate his bomb. Nemesis survives the blast, and in a final confrontation, he and Morrow each shoot each other. Morrow kills Nemesis with a head shot, and himself is taken to emergency surgery. He flatlines during surgery but survives, and as the series concludes is on a beach vacation with his family, including his newborn triplet granddaughters. There he is given a letter, ostensibly given to the waiter ten years earlier, congratulating Morrow and claiming to be from the head of a company that arranges for rich people to become supervillains.
Marvel paid a fan for the black costume idea, which would evolve to become Venom.
The Donger and Me, by Adrian Tomine
