Zero is a story told by a surly old man with a bottle of booze and a gun pointed at his head by a child in the year 2038. He doesn’t even flinch, and he’s ready to take the bullet. Once his story is done.
Zero #1 informs us that the man once had a mission in the Gaza Strip back in 2018 to reclaim some unofficial technology from The Agency that had found its way into the wrong hands – or rather, the wrong body. This technology basically makes super-soldiers when grafted onto a guy, and thus his mission is to somehow step into the middle of a savage three-hour-long death-match between an Israeli and a Palestinian soldier jacked up on tech. It’s a brutal, bloody, knock-down, drag-out, face-chewing fight that doesn’t end until he tricks a tank crew to blow the Palestinian away. Then, upon seeing a dead child as their collateral damage, he breaks protocol and guns down the Israeli as well. He lies about the chain of events to the Agency, and apparently has been concealing truths from them ever since – which is probably why there’s a child with a gun to his head in 2038.
Writer Ales Kot is unspooling an intense, ruthless look at life in the soldier-spy business. You are nothing but a weapon, they are nothing but targets. Tools and mission objectives. That’s what The Agency makes you, and they start making you that way from birth. That’s how it was with Edward Zero, one of the last two operatives of The Agency’s era before it was all simulators and lockdown-brainwash training. It used to be hands-on, so in a world where emotional connections are punishable, the fact that Zero’s handler Roman Zizek has a soft spot for him is something that must be kept under wraps.
That’s something hinted at in Zero #2, showing us Edward’s childhood back in 2000 with his friend Mina Thorpe, where they were taught things like “every promise is a lie,” “existence is a perpetual state of war,” and “war keeps us alive.” Where punishment for spacing out in class is being crammed into an airtight box and dropped into an icy lake and being told to escape or die. Where ten-year-olds are forced to stalk their targets for three days before killing them, which Edward does with a former IRA bomber named Keiran Connelly who has retired and settled into a happy family life. Seeing that did not deter him from pulling the trigger, and he only hesitated once Connelly, bleeding out on his floor, would not return fire because “ye just a wee boy. I don’t kill boys.” Even that small bit of morality was a bombshell to him.
Zero #3 takes us to Shanghai in 2019, where Edward and Mina – playing the role of red-headed superspy so well that she’s even using the codename Natasha Mironoff – have infiltrated a “crowdfunding party for terrorists” that was publicized by a paper fanzine to avoid internet tracing. They’re tracking its ski-masked organizer named Ginsberg Nova, who Edward catches showing off a high-tech teleportation machine. However, the jig is up once Mina is made (and apparently betrayed), and the recon mission turns ugly, and the mis-timed escape through that tele-portal leaves Edward in snowy Ottawa, holding Mina’s smoldering, dismembered arm.
This book pulls no punches, and it manages to incorporate science fiction elements without letting them turn this heartless spy gaming into some kind of whiz-bang ’60s-style adventure. This is very much in the ugly, dirty now and the troubling, scary soon. Each of Kot’s first three issues has featured a different artist. Michael Walsh handled Zero #1, and that fight was a visceral explosion of violence. You felt every punch, kick, bullet and bash. Tradd More’s work on Zero #2 has a somewhat more cartoonish look to it – not enough to detract from the tone of the story, but enough so that it fits the theme of childhood lost. Then Mateus Santolouco steps in for Zero #3, and we feel the impact of Zero throat-kicking a war criminal through the back of a toilet stall wall, and we can sense the level of struggle when he has to strip naked and navigate a ventilation duct in order to catch Nova’s demonstration.
Kot’s storytelling is unpredictable, and Zero is a book that finds a way to destroy any glamour in the notion of the super-spy. You can really feel the nothing that his characters have been taught to believe themselves to be. This is a job you don’t want. It is a life you don’t want. But it’s a series you’ll want to read.
