Mama Jane reads a comic: Art Ops Issue #1

Art Ops issue #1

Art Ops is written by Shaun Simon, art by Mike Allred and published by Vertigo. I was really hoping that Art Ops was going to involve great works of art teaming up to kick some butt. I was also hoping to see The Mona Lisa battle The Scream or Michael Angelo's David fighting The Thinker (see I know art I'm cultured). But what I got was a secret agent organization full of, frankly, unlikable characters and so far a story that doesn't really pull you in with anything special.

Art Ops begins with a woman named Jones and her team walking through the Louvre, discussing the recent destruction of valuable works of art and there concerns for one of the most famous paintings in the world, The Mona Lisa. Jones is a team leader of the Art Ops, an organization tasked with protecting great works of art. The team uses a special device to pull the Mona Lisa out of her painting and replace her with a stand in, explaining that she is going into a sort of witness protection style program for famous works of art. We then meet Reggie, the son of the leader of the Art Ops team as he drinks, smokes drugs and messes around with his girlfriend, Jess, in his mother's bed (class Reggie, all class). In typical teenage angst fashion, Reggie whines about his mother's lack of attention growing up before realizing that his "buzz" is wearing off and him and Jess decide to go buy more weed (our hero everybody). During his transaction with the drug dealers, a painting on the wall comes alive and severely injures Reggie and during the commotion Jess is killed. As Reggie is dying his mother appears and saves him using art to heal his wound. Two years later Reggie is contacted and learns that his mother is missing along with the entire Art Ops organization and is asked to help find them.

I was super underwhelmed by the art of Art Ops, not because its bad but because it seems to have missed a fantastic opportunity to show more great works of art coming to life like the Mona Lisa., I wanted to see statues talking, graffiti murals giving directions and paintings giving advice. I was really hoping for a little more art in a comic called Art Ops.

Reggie is our main character at this point and so far I've found him entirely unlikable as he complains about his mother's lack of attention and messes around in her bed. It just seems like the lowest representation of teenage angst with little actual reasoning to back it up. Reggie says that his mother was often absent during his childhood but then goes on to say she would set him up with a colouring book while she worked not while she went out and partied or drank herself into a coma, she was working to provide for them.

I was really disappointed in Art Ops possibly because I already had my own ideas as to what I was expecting. But really so far I just found the characters unlikable and the story just a little "meh" for lack of a better word.