The Saga of F5 by Tony Daniel

 I forget how I discovered F5 and its spinoffs.  My guess is either an ad or in the 50c bin.  Two four issue miniseries and a special so 9 issues in total easy enough to buy and read in an afternoon.

The special F5 origins came out in April of 2000 and is the quick introduction to the members of F5 – a paramilitary unit multiple members – we see team commander Hollister waiting to be picked up by his boss Paps Thanos and he then spends a page giving us a rundown on each of the members of F5:

·       Sasha Ho: ex-violin prodigy who at 18 joined the Marines and later became a elite bounty hunter.

·       Case Seymore: Runaway and street smart

·       Paco Lopez: gang banger turned vigilante turned Navy SEAL.  He actually has the coolest look with two big knives and a balaclava. 

·       Australian born Zippy Jaeger treasure hunter who left Australia with a bounty on his head and joined the Navy SEALS.

·       Penny Hurst: socialite and spy and team leader

It is revealed that Thanos has his own F5 team

·       Martin Brice super agent and team leader

·       Manu: former Air Force and mechanical genius

·       Molly O’Brian: former aviator rescued from the brig by Thanos

·       Naomi Co Chin: Native American thrill seeker and deep sea treasure hunter hunting for the people who wiped out her village

·       Abraham Silke: product of a government experiment that allows him to change his appearance at will.

It’s a good set up lets us know about the factions but doesn’t really tell us what F5 is and what it does.  But that’s for the main book to do which also came out in April 2000.

Issue #1 opens with Penny Hurst being interrogated for being a traitor and we flash back to a mission in Bolungarvika, Iceland and we get page showing us what appears to be  a screen showing the mission objectives -infiltrate a contamination bunker, get samples of anthrax and plutonium for study, then dilute and release the chemicals, then rendezvous with the sub and blow the place up. 

Now I have no idea who is running this place is it an official Icelandic military base? A terrorist HQ? A private research lab?  It doesn’t matter F5 is on the case that’s all that matters.

Then we flash back to the mission, no idea how long ago this was, a week? Did they just get back?  A month?  Who knows?  But the mission is happening at noon (12pm)

Penny is following a grey haired man who is bleeding.  He calls her sweetie and that she’d been lying to him for six months.  So the implication is that Penny at least has been undercover for six months.  Penny kills the guy and takes the cylinders he was carrying.

Sasha is in the compression chamber and she kills the three guards by dropping down from the ventilation shafts and shoots them.  She checks in with Paco and Wally.

Paco is on the run, under fire, carrying Wally on his shoulder who has been shot.  Hang on, who is Wally??? He’s not mentioned in the Origins one shot.  But he’s been shot and is slowing down Paco. Sasha is having trouble with the water valve.

There’s some radio chatter between Penny, Zippy, Sasha and Paco but it feels like Zippy is calling Penny, Sasha.

I’m going to stop here – Daniel writes Zippy’s dialogue in ‘Strine or the Aussie accent

“Reddie wheneva yew ahr, Sasha”  I need more Zippy.

Paco now in a rush buries Wally in the snow to get to Sasha, lucky he does as a bad guy has snuck up on Sasha and got a garotte on her throat.  Paco throws a knife which goes into our villain’s back.  Paco retrieves the knife and opens the valve and Zippy opens the flood gates.

Paco has to go back to get Wally as the team is to meet the sub.  Penny is under fire at the meeting point but Zippy judo chops the shooter. 

Paco and Sasha go to get Wally but can’t find him so Sasha knocks some sense into him as out silver haired guy that Penny is not as dead as we thought and sets off the self destruct code.

The sub appears and only Penny and Zippy are there to meet Hollister, and two blondes – one calls Hollister Dad, and the other looks like Casey.  But Sasha and Paco found a hang glider and escaped the explosion.

That mission was completely FUBAR,  Wally died and there was some sloppiness, so Penny tells her mysterious interrogator.  That mission caused changes to the F5 agency .

We now flashback to F5 headquarters, their cover is that they are F5 Storm Trackers, operating out of an office in Seattle.

Hollister’s daughter’s name in Gwenn we discover as Camilla (who seems to be a boss of F5) brings in Paps Thanos famous spy hunter, who has been unemployed since the end of the Cold War to work with F5.

There was a radioactive meteorite that landed in the ocean near Greenland.  It killed a lot of fish and someone stole the rock and it was able to be tracked due to the trail of death with the meteorite ending up in Germany.

German tech CEO Marius Van Kessler has the meteor and clearly he cannot want the meteor for any good purpose.  This mission is so important that Pap has brought in his own team.

There’s a test mission to see which team is the lead team, oh dear the radioactive meteor good thing that wasn’t super urgent or anything.  The mission is to infiltrate a navy ship deactivate the radar and steal a silver briefcase.  Oh noes Hollister goes missing.  Blah blah the OG F5 infiltrate and do their thing.  Gwenn offers some computer assistance (and we discover that she is 12 – I don’t care if her old man is the control - a 12 year old on covert missions is just insane.) 

But it was all a trap and Thanos is there to get the drop on Penny but Sasha Ho knocks him out for 25 minutes and that’s the end of issue 1.

I want to like F5 but it feels like there is too much information I don’t need and not enough of what I do want.  It feels like the characters all know what’s going on and there is no need to explain it to each other.  The story needs an entry point character, the new team member that requires an explanation of what is going on. 

That could have been Penny’s interrogator.  It may have been better to have just the main F5 team, with Penny as leader have their missions as the focus of the first issue and introduce the second team in the second issue.

I’ve been a bit harsh on F5, but that’s because I want to like this. The mission to stop Van Kessler and the Saturn germ he distilled from the meteor is a good mission. The revelation of who the traitors/double agents are is ok. I think that the art is really good.

I am actually curious to see where the F5 team goes from here – do the surviving members continue operations?  There were no further F5 adventures.

Tony Daniel formed a company F5 Entertainment with the intent of taking this and The Tenth to Hollywood.

Actually it’s not entirely true that there are no more F5 stories because one of the revelations of F5 is that Abraham Silke is actually Sandra Silke which leads into her origin miniseries called Silke.

I actually liked Silke better storywise because it is developing just one character, Silke, and how she became the product of a government experiment that allows her to change her appearance at will.  Also we are following Silke and learning information with her, so we have a better entry point into this world.  Silke came out starting in January 2001 maybe if had come first then we get Silke joining F5 and Abraham/Sandra Silke learning about the team and trying to track down the traitor, the F5 series would work better for me.

Daniel seems to be working in DC and Marvel these days and is unlikely to return to the world of F5. 

 I really wanted F5 to sit up there with Danger Girl as a fun spy comic but it was ultimately let down by a story that wouldn't let me in.