Agent Drake needs to get back in his body in Hardcore No. 5
Hardcore is a hyper-violent sci-fi take on consciousness
Two good questions to ask yourself are “what is violence?” and “what is consciousness?” The answers to those questions have been pondered for centuries, and there might be more objective data about what they aren’t. Violence has been a part of comics for a long, long time, and the headier topic of consciousness has been interpreted pretty solidly for roughly the same amount of years, with hundreds of fantastic takes on both questions. Hardcore puts in its two cents on the topics with a whole bunch of inertia and gritty delight, spinning a tale about a government agency that can put one person’s consciousness into another person’s body, via technology, and do spy stuff or terrorist stuff or pretty much anything, and long as the person switches back in three days.
Writer Andy Diggle, artist Alessandro Vitti, colorist Adriano Lucas and letterer Thomas Mauer, with a cover from the great Dan Panosian, have whipped up a great take on unnecessary force and the potential of the human mind.
Image Comics
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Flashbangs and fakeouts await in Hardcore
At the end of the last issue, Agent Drake, piloting someone else’s body, finally made it back to Hardcore headquarters, where Markus, the villain, appeared to be holding all the cards, until we saw that Drake had a bomb-vest on. This issue starts out with Drake threatening to blow the vest, killing himself and Markus, but Markus quickly calls his bluff, relishing the thought of Drake reaching his 3-day limit withing moments and dropping dead. The concept of someone uploading their mind into someone else’s body to do espionage is brilliant, it must be stated. Hardcore just tosses Murphy’s law at that premise and runs with it. Drake gives Markus the vest’s trigger, which turns out to only be a flashbang, and Drake then uses the momentary confusion to start killing everyone in the room, in typical hyper-violent Drake style.
Image Comics
Bomb-vests and overrides get tossed around in Hardcore
Drake tosses the bomb-vest at some red shirts and shoots it, causing it to explode and do a bunch of damage. This allows Drake to get the drop on Markus, but then Bonnie, the double agent, gets the drop on him. Markus takes the opportunity to give bad guy dialogue about Drake’s time being up, and the timer on the villain’s watch reaches zero. Drake falls to the ground, seemingly dead, and Markus murders Bonnie, in typical evil dude fashion. It looks like the bad guy has won, which is always an interesting twist in literature, until Drake flies in out of nowhere; he gave Markus a shorter time than he actually had left, and the two now grapple. Drake puts a big wallop on Markus, zipties him to Markus’ bomb in the Hardcore headquarters, and accesses the technology necessary to put his mind back in his own body, currently inside of a blast-proof receptacle.
Next. Death and War duke it out in East of West No. 42!. dark
Agent Drake, in his real body, survives the blast and tells Carter, the chief operative in charge of Hardcore, that Markus somehow also survived, and that is how the first arc ends. Pretty good cliffhanger; it seems like Markus had access to some nifty teleporter tech, perhaps. Sound concepts and arresting visuals make Hardcore the kind of comic that gets adapted for some kind of screens, and it is easy to visualize a limites television series based on this comic. 9/10, highly recommend. Let us know what you thought in the comments section below.