Agents of Atlas: Pandemonium

Agents of Atlas: Collected Editions #7

by Greg Pak, Jeff Parker, Nico Leon (Illustrator)

Collects Agents Of Atlas (2019) #1-5.

Asia’s greatest heroes unite! By popular demand, the New Agents of Atlas return as Amadeus Cho, Silk, Shang-Chi, Wave, Jimmy Woo and all your favorites defend the cross-Asian portal city of Pan against the science/magic threat of one of Marvel’s classic villains! It’s timeless action as heroes from multiple lands clash with one another, battle horrific monsters side by side — and hopefully save the world along the way! But who is Isaac Ikeda, the Protector of Pan? And what does Mike Nguyen and the Big Nguyen company have planned for Pan? The newest Giant-Man, Raz Malhotra, joins the fun as the team goes big on action — and romance! But who’s kissing whom? Plus: The original Agents of Atlas — Namora, M-11, Venus, Gorilla-Man, 3-D Man and Marvel Boy — reunite for a top-secret mission!

Genres: Comics, Marvel, Graphic Novels, Graphic Novels Comics, Superheroes, Fiction, Science Fiction

120 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 18, 2020

About the author

Greg Pak is an award-winning Korean American comic book writer and filmmaker currently writing "Lawful" for BOOM and "Sam Wilson: Captain America" (with Evan Narcisse) for Marvel. Pak wrote the "Princess Who Saved Herself" children's book and the “Code Monkey Save World” graphic novel based on the songs of Jonathan Coulton and co-wrote (with Fred Van Lente) the acclaimed “Make Comics Like the Pros” how-to book. Pak's other work includes "Planet Hulk," "Darth Vader," "Mech Cadet Yu," "Ronin Island," "Action Comics," and "Magneto Testament."

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was OK. I mainly enjoyed it because of the dragons.

I'm uncomfortable with Marvel 'borrowing' some of these characters from the video game company that developed them, as it will only take the companies to fall out for these books to suddenly disappear from Marvel Unlimited and not be collected for rights reasons. You'd think Marvel would learn its lesson from Rom, Micronauts, Transformers, GI Joe and all the other franchises they've integrated into the Marvel Universe and then lost the rights to use. I have the same reservations about their current use of Conan.

Anyway, I digress. This book was fine, but nothing that really set my world afire (#dragonpun).

[Tiag⊗ the Mutant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Your usual teenage superhero series, with heavy focus on young romance and asian culture, not really my thing.

[Chris Lemmerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fresh off their success during the War Of The Realms, the new Agents of Atlas reunite for a brand new problem as a tech mogul creates teleport gates in most of the major Asian cities in the effort to create a brand new pan-Asian supercity. Of course, there's a seedy underbelly to this, and it means that Amadeus Cho and his friends have to investigate.

The cast's probably still too big, if we're being honest. The main problem with the War Of The Realms iteration of the book was that most characters didn't get to do much beyond explain their powers and fight some stuff, and there is a lot more actual interplay between them here, but it's still a cast of like 10 characters so some of them still get short thrift while Amadeus gets centre stage almost all the time.

The mystery itself is fun, although as it builds to a crescendo the series abruptly ends, to be continued in Atlantis Attacks!, which is a bit of a dick move. It's also a plot that could probably have been solved a little quicker if Jimmy Woo deigned to have a conversation, but that'd be too easy I guess.

Nico Leon's on art, although it feels a bit sparse even for him. There aren't half as many background gags or fun expressions as I'm used to in his work, but the large cast of characters probably puts a stopper on that.

The Agents Of Atlas are back, in one form or another. We'll see how much longer they stick around.

[Kyle Dinges · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this much more than I was expecting to. Agents of Atlas spins out of the War of the Realms tie-in by the same name. I thought the tie-in was decent, on the better end of the event tie-in spectrum, but nothing spectacular. Now that Greg Pak has an opportunity to tell a story that's less involved with the larger universe, I found the book to be quite enjoyable.

Agents of Atlas is a team made up of superheroes from across Asia, or who are of Asian descent, like Amadeus Cho, Cindy Moon (Silk), and Shang-Chi. The patchwork team works well together as most of them are either new or under-utilized. I was most appreciative to see Silk involved, it's been a little while since she's either had her own book or been a key part of another.

The story revolves around the creation of a series of gates that connect some of the biggest Asian cities across the globe. The resulting hub is called Pan and promises to be a refuge for everyone. If you can believe it, dear reader, this promise is too good to be true. It's just a perfectly fun and reasonable volume of comic books.

Notably, this book is actually written by someone, in Pak, of Asian descent. Often at the big two, attempts at introducing a diverse grouping of characters (while sometimes successful!) end up being spearheaded by a white dude *cough* Miles Morales *cough* Ironheart *cough*. Sorry, had something caught in my throat.

The majority of the book is penciled by Nico Leon, who does a good job conveying both action and interaction. It's equal parts dragon throw-downs and blushing cheeks (dutifully colored by Rachelle Rosenberg) as teenage romance abounds.

It looks like this feeds into a separate event and is just a one-off mini-series, which is a bit disappointing as I'd have liked to read more. Hopefully one day I will!

[Adelaine Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Couldn’t really get into the story but I liked how the characters interacted with each other. Would have liked to have way more Shang chi because he was barely in this but I ADORED silk with all my heart

[Kurt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The covers are absolutely beautiful thanks to the amazing Junggeun Yoon (not to mention some of the amazing variant covers too), but the artwork inside left a lot to be desired. It all looked like super basic cartoon outlines with a decent job of coloring within the lines.

As for the story itself, it was decent. But, of course, the one relationship you're wanting to happens is thrown out the window and the one you didn't want to happen does. And that relationship was so forced that they actually had to bring a new character onto the team and a completely other new character just to make it happen.

Otherwise, I'd have been really interested in reading on a bit more into this title. A few of the characters are complete tokens, such as Amadeus/Brawn being an copy of Hulk, Silk/Cindy Moon being one of the many many copies of Spider-man, and Giant-Man/Raz, well, he even has little antennas on his head... But White Fox, Luna Snow, Crescent, Aero and Wave are all great new non-tokenized characters and that's what we need more of.

[Sesana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like most of the characters in this book, and the basic concept of the storyline is solid enough. However, the cast is just too big. The most recent iteration of Champions had the same problem, and it came from pretty much the same instinct. Where Champions wanted to collect every teen(ish) hero in the Marvel Universe, Agents of Atlas wants to collect every hero of Asian descent. And there's just no reason for all of them to be active at the same time. Pare the team down to the truly essential characters, and the whole thing would go better. Also, the story sort of dives off a cliff at the last minute in a really annoying way. I guess to see the conclusion, I'll have to read Atlantis Attacks, which looks like it's going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in bringing a lot of storylines to a conclusion at once.

[Sarospice · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not diversity to stick all the pan asian characters in one book but this had an interesting cast and opening concept: millennial wunderkid opens portals for major asian towns that anyone can use, for a price. They start to explore issues of refugees and borders and cost then just decide it's powered by dragons before Namor jumps in to lead to ANOTHER mini series. A few interesting kisses then bye. Will there be any character development? I feel like I learned nothing about these people...

[Natasha Carpina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not entirely sure about all of the events in the whole series. There were too many things happening all at once it looked like different puzzle pieces tried to fit into each other. And if this was just 5 issues, there was no closure as to why Jimmy and Mike are connected. Too many questions were unanswered.

[Pat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Adequate but not great. It might appeal to a more teenage market.
It has two marvel characters that I do like Jimmy Woo but in this he is barely in it and Shang Chi who is not much like the character in other books. He makes a joke about day trading which was amusing but not really in character.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars would be my actual rating on this one, partly because the "Behind the Veil" short that wasn't part of the main arc confused me more than it helped.

So this was a Marvel team-up that I had absolutely no knowledge of previously, most of the characters were brand new to me, and I felt truly fortunate that I found it on the shelves at my library and decided to take a chance on it!

The Agents of Atlas is an organization under the leadership of Jimmy Woo and in this volume we meet Amadaeus Cho (aka Brawn--a hulk type superhero who has appearances elsewhere in the Marvel Universe, so I'll likely be looking into those!) who's leading a team made up of Cindy Moon (Silk), Seol Hee (Luna Snow), Pearl Pangan (Wave) and Lei Ling (Aero), as they try to clean up a previous mess (which I believe starts in the War of the Realms: New Agents of Atlas....which I'll be checking out). They manage to do this with help from a stranger who calls himself the Protector of Pan--Isaac Ikeda--and while he throws off their groove, he does end up helping, only to vanish through a portal, leaving the team with all kinds of questions that go unanswered..... until some time later when portals start appearing in Asian cities and neighborhoods and brings the cities together in a cross-Asian city called PAN. Pan has been created by a billionaire Mike Nguyen intent on creating this utopian city that will be available by subscription pass and aims to use the heroes that are part of the Agents of Atlas to protect this investment. When the team finds themselves inadvertently drawn into this (with the mysterious Protector and familiar faces like Shang-Chi!) adventure, they do their best to get to find Nguyen's motivations are and keep themselves from being used as pawns!

Overall, this was a fun introduction to new characters that left me wanting to know more about their individual backstories and what sort of current shenanigans they might get into. The biggest flaw of any ensemble cast is that the narrative focuses on central characters, leaving the rest on the periphery which invariably disappoints me! So I do hope to learn more about Wave and Aero and some of those other folks. The group dynamics were fun (the friendship between Silk and Brawn was delightful and a very relatable friendship!)
I didn't love the short one-shot "Behind the Veil" that was part of this book--I can sort of see what they were doing with creating a mystery around Jimmy Woo and the dragon he's allied with, but ultimately it was a cast of new characters that had little relevance to the main arc, and the mystery with Woo wasn't resolved in this volume.
The art was a good pairing to this action packed story--a good portion of dramatic splash pages, power team up panels and fun reaction panels in conversations. There were a lot of sound effect kind of texts which did get a bit distracting because I started overthinking -- what sound is this supposed to be?
I would recommend to folks looking for fun team-ups and I really do hope these characters might inspire future storytellers!
(can you tell I read this for my grad school class re: comics/manga? because I did. So here we are.)

[Alex Sarll]

One of those well-intentioned but slightly awkward Marvel comics, in which Jimmy Woo (a much cooler customer in the comics than his affable MCU incarnation) assembles a new team basically comprising all of Marvel's Asian or Asian-American heroes (except for Kamala Khan, presumably because she has a high enough profile as is). Which, given they're scattered all around the Pacific and beyond, is really stretching geographical plausibility, even if that also serves as a handy description of the antagonist's plan: Pan, a company with the tech to enable instant, general travel between great Asian cities. There's some nice needling in this of tech-bro pretensions to 'disruption' – Pan's CEO makes lots of grand-sounding comments about breaking down borders and overcoming distance, but is quick to send in the goon squad once the penniless refugees arrive – but even in so far as we're meant to see him as handwaving, the story never really engages with stuff like the number of countries in the region who are daggers drawn with each other and where this would be liable to properly kick things off. Similarly, we get more drama regarding unauthorised dissemination of an image of two team-mates having a heterosexual smooch than we do for the gay follow-up, despite the fact that one of the participants in the latter is resident in Modi's India so would be likely to get considerably more blowback from that. And if the book can be forgiven for not wanting to get into the full geopolitical ramifications of its Macguffin, there's less excuse for some of the odd characterisation along the way – having Shang-Chi engage in day-trading does make for one good punchline, but only at the cost of upending decades of stories which really don't seem to fit with that. There is fun stuff dotted about, some of it reasonably subtle (Amadeus Cho's exasperated attempts at playing team leader, so much less slick now he has teenage hormones and gamma rays to deal with than they were back in his child genius, World War Hulk days) and some a lot less so – this is a comic always happy to throw a dragon (or wyvern, or even just a giant lizard) into the mix when things slow down. But they can't stop it from feeling like it's trying to do too many big things in far too little space to carry it off.

[Doctor Doom · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has a lot of likes and many stars on Amazon... I don't get it.
1] It seems to be pandering. Not representing Asian characters out of respect but it feels forced, funky and immature.
2] Is this book aimed at middle-school age because the characters all act like that age? Cho especially is written down from where he was before. I have read many books with Cho in them, and while he was socially inept it was NOT at this level.
3] The artwork is inconsistent it goes from good to bad to poorly drawn to... well, you get the idea.
4] Normally I will finish a book like this but I could no longer stomach the stupid decisions the characters were making.
5] Reading a lot of Shang-Chi right now because its available for free with Prime. This rendition of him is the most unlike him I have ever read and I read him when he first appeared in the 1970s.

That's enough... not interested in any more of this garbage.

[James Rodrigues · Rating 3 out of 5]

Agents of Atlas were a group I heard much about but weren't familiar with, so this revamp gave me the perfect jumping-on point. This iteration of the Agents are dealing with a billionaire's invention which breaks down borders across Asian cities, while Dragons keep attacking. There's some great characters in this roster, although there's too many characters who don't get enough time. I'd rather have seen more time with Sword Master, White Fox, and Crescent and Io than incorporating the previous Agents of Atlas characters. There's interesting thoughts behind what's the right course of action, especially with the arrival of refugees, although it ends a bit too suddenly to set-up the next instalment.

[Cheeno · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a fun series especially since they're all Asian/Asian American and there's a powerful Filipino superhero with Pearl Pangan aka Wave. The art by Nico Leon and Rachelle Rosenberg is decent; I wished more variety and playfulness with it. The story is fun and it packed some serious issues like compensation for being an agent of Atlas which, by the way, I think the first time it was mentioned in any comics I've read. There's a scene where Wave and Luna talked about their financial differences and I think that's good.
There's a dilemma raised towards the end of this volume which I'm really curious how Amadeus would able to resolve.

[Trike · Rating 3 out of 5]

A billionaire trying to become a trillionaire by creating a common Asian city by linking various other cities via portals. Then dragons show up. Can we trust the superwealthy? Of course not. But maybe some people will benefit from this place he calls Pan. But can the Agents of Atlas trust Jimmy Woo? Hard to say, because the dude is acting shady as hell.

This is YA stuff, which is fine, but it doesn’t read like typical Jimmy Woo, and Pak holds back info unnecessarily in order to preserve the tension, a gambit that’s too obvious and clunky to be enjoyable. The reveal at the end is nice, but the led up is too slow of a burn, honestly. Still, it’s fine for its intended audience.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fun follow up to the war of the realms agents of atlas series that I bought as singles. Leon's simpler style reminds me of manga but with correct proportions and the colours at a lightness to proceedings. Pak writes lots of cute little moments where the expressive way Leon draws shines and the action is very dynamic. Interestingly the story feels quite straightforward but actually, especially in the final issue we see a real dilemma to which the team need to find a solution.

Annoyingly this run is not self-contained and the story continues in a relaunch, Atlantis Attacks, that I'll have to pick up.

[Rocky Sunico · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book wasn't quite as fun as the War of the Realms one. I guess it's because they got bogged down with a weird larger story arc about the portal-connected city of Pan and that denied us proper space for decent character development. We have a lot about Amadeus struggling to become a better leader for the team and a good number of one-off jokes and very Asian sight gags here and there, but the whole thing didn't quite come together to be a greater larger story.

And the cliffhanger ending that ties to another story didn't really help things either.

[LadyRemy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm enjoying reading about the next generation of heroes with Jimmy as the boss and Amadeus/Brawn leading the crew.

No surprise the tech mogul is the villain. I really enjoyed the build up and the introduction of dragons. I hope the team gets more time to be normal, the little snippets of their lives outside of the suits was interesting to me. I'd like to learn more about their characters. So far, Silk is my favorite character.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really do appreciate that this was a great idea for a story and it was full of diverse characters but unfortunately was poorly executed and the writing left much to be desired. Hopefully these characters can make a come back in a future run. Would love to see a stand alone run with Luna Snow.

[Jairo Ortiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se me ha hecho cortísimo, amono.
En mi corazón pa siempre, y espero que marvel studios apueste más por sus personajes asiáticos, y que a partir de shan-chi profundicen más y traigan más chiques.
This is me soñando altísimo.

Por cierto, tiene un final abierto, por si te da toc y tal.

[Colin Parfitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Obscure characters and teen angst.

None of the characters (except Cho, whose not the Hulk anymore but still a big green guy) are well defined and there's too much teen angst, and repeatedly hitting dragons.

[Glyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

True to the name, this book was incredibly chaotic. It was really fun tho, and I definitely want to read more of this run! Probably my favourite part was the siren character singing “Jolene”, lmao. Oh, tho the queer rep was appreciated too!

[Mark Dickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much better than the tie in to War of the Realms that launched this series. A narrowed selection of focal characters plus an actual plot made this series really enjoyable. The stakes feel real, as do the characters, so I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next.

[Jason Tanner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Big improvement from the previous volume. More thematically tied to the old Atlas team than before. Interesting characters and developments. But still feels like it was rushed to print when it needed more polishing. Also, it ended on a cliffhanger and I am not aware of a follow-up book. 🙁

[Iris Nevers · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Read in single issues]

I wish there was more Amadeus/Luna Snow romance in this but a fun read nonetheless.

[Rob Schamberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of fun!

[Stephen Adkison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay story by Pak. Too many characters, but the ones featured (mostly Amadeus) do get some good storytelling. Felt like treading water for the next arc.

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

[Bekka · Rating 4 out of 5]

A still very enjoyable story, building on character dynamics from the first one. And, there is also DRAGONS in this one, and you can never go wrong with dragons!