Venditti, Robert & Huddleston, Mike – The Homeland Directive

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The Homeland Directive

When my biggest problem with a book is its fairly generic title, it’s safe to say that I don’t actually have much of a problem with the book at all. This is the story of a conspiracy within the U.S. government, told with snippets from all sides. There are the two scientists who have been targeted for assassination, although we don’t learn why for quite some time (and obviously one of them gets away initially, as there wouldn’t be much of a story otherwise). There’s the Homeland Security chief, who’s fed up with a feckless President who is more caught up in his image than in doing what the chief considers the necessary dirty work. You also have three agents from disparate government agencies who have detected that something is up and have decided to help the targeted scientists, and there’s the agent (or assassin) who’s trying to take them all out. These are the trickiest comics/stories to review, as they’re based almost entirely on suspense and the ability to keep surprising the reader, and a sloppy reviewer can take that away pretty easily. I can tell you that the suspense is so expertly handled that the ending of the book completely snuck up on me, which is tough to have happen when you’re holding a physical copy of a comic and can tell that there aren’t many pages left. It felt like it could have gone on longer, but they mentioned in the story a fact that would have kept a book like this short: there are tons of ways for the government to find you and only so many ways that you can avoid being found. One thing that I usually pick up on in a story (sometimes too much, depending on who you ask) is whether or not it’s plausible, and it has to be plausible the whole way through for a book to “win.” This one meets that test all the way through up to and including the way the ending is handled, and what more can you ask out of a suspense/thriller? It even has a few messages tucked in, which can be dishearteningly rare in small press comics. Of course, Robert Venditti is the guy who wrote “The Surrogates,” so maybe “small press” is stretching it a bit. Anyway: it’s relentlessly suspenseful, the use of color only in portions was inspired, and, just to give them something hokey to use as a quote that I also believe, it was a hell of a ride. $14.95