Velvet Volume 2: The Secret Lives of Dead Men
I’m happy I stuck with this series. I thought Before the Living End was generic and uninteresting spy stuff, but The Secret Lives of Dead Men drew me in. It’s still terribly generic, but I found myself genuinely curious as to what the game behind the game was and who was being played. Even though the answer to that latter question seems to be everyone.
So sexy superspy Velvet Templeton, clad in her skin-tight prototype stealth suit (bullet proof, and with wings for gliding off of tall buildings) is running around Europe with stolen passports trying to find out who framed her for the murder of secret agent X-14. Apparently it all goes back to some shit that was going down in the 1950s (the story is set in 1973) and Velvet’s husband, codenamed Mockingbird.
Don’t think you’re going to get any answers here! Just a lot more questions. But I enjoyed all of it, and was even glued to long stretches of dialogue that take place between two people sitting in a bar or together on a train. You know these conversations are games as well, but it’s fun to watch Velvet playing them as she follows the bread crumbs to whatever final twist Ed Brubaker has up his sleeve.
Alex Good 
An improvement on Volume 1 then. Fingers crossed No.3 builds on that!
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Yep! Haven’t picked that up yet so just have to hope.
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Those guys on the cover have “glowering” down to an art, don’t they? 😀
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They do! And they did on the cover of the first volume too. You don’t want to mess with a glowerer!
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Not unless you’ve got a shiv or a kosh anyway 😀
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I’m a little concerned seeing “sexy superspy” paired with “husband”……….
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Velvet apparently slept around a lot.
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Right. So does a husband figure in? They must be very practical — and broadminded.
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They seem to have had a professional and ambiguous relationship. They don’t go into it that much because it’s all part of the backstory that I think is only going to be revealed later.
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1 gets you 2 that she killed the husband for a mission…
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Hubby apparently was locked up in a nuthouse because he was accused of wiping out his own intelligence section, but it’s starting to seem like that was a set-up and that he might not even be crazy. I think he’s still alive but dying, but the comic hasn’t shown him yet. It’s kind of murky. I don’t think Velvet herself is involved, since everyone is trying to track her down and kill her as she puts this all together, but I wouldn’t put it past the writer as there must be a pretty big twist coming up.
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