184 ESPIONAGE
organization, Cobra Command, led by the aptly named Cobra Commander. Cobra’s
mission involved the standard genre themes of dismantling the world’s governments
and amassing wealth and power.
In 1987, an overlooked spoof on the spy genre, Th e Trouble with Girls, was published
by Malibu and Comico. Running until 1991 with a four-issue follow-up series pub-
lished by Marvel in 1993, Th e Trouble with Girls followed the adventures of Lester Girls,
the essential average-man who fi nds himself in a variety of genre-related situations. Th e
underlining theme of this satirical look at the genre is that Lester Girls has no desire to
be embroiled in these situations and would rather be left alone.
While Marvel Comics set the tone with its brand of Silver Age espionage themes,
in the modern age DC also devoted many of its series to covert operations. Of note
is John Ostrander’s work on Suicide Squad, running 66 issues from 1987 to 1992,
with a second (albeit short-lived) series in 2001. The Suicide Squad was a group
of incarcerated supervillains who agreed to work as covert, black ops government
agents. The team was a mixture of petty criminals from previous DC books, nota-
bly Deadshot and Captain Boomerang. The team also included underused heroes
such as Vixen, Nemesis, and Nightshade. The intelligence agency Checkmate was
a spin-off of Suicide Squad and was originally intended as an elite covert operations
agency. Following the events in 2006’s Infinite Crisis, specifically the OMAC Proj-
ect, Checkmate became a United Nations–chartered metahuman monitoring force.
Another covert organization seen in the DC universe is the DEO (Department
of Extranormal Operations), which also functions in a similar role as the present
Checkmate.
DC also created special operations teams from its mainstream titles. Th e Justice
League Elite was an attempt to integrate some members of the popular Justice League
into secretive covert, black ops missions. Th e idea never really caught on, as DC had the
Suicide Squad essentially doing the same thing. Th e team was composed of Th e Flash ,
Green Arrow, and a number of lesser known DC properties.
In 1994 Wetworks, an original Image Comics publication created by Whilce Portacio
and writer Brandon Choi, featured a superhuman black ops team battling supernatural
threats. It put more emphasis on action-oriented art than on story development, as was
common with many artist-oriented Image books of the mid-to-late 1990s. Danger Girl
(1998) was yet another spoof on the James Bond theme and was known more for J. Scott
Campbell’s fetish art (featuring an inadequately or tightly clothed team of women, a staple
of many Image-era comics) rather than any of its story elements.
One signifi cant contribution to the development of the adventure/espionage genre
came in 1999 with Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Th is series revisits
the late-19th-century origins as a team of Victorian-era literary characters is formed to
work for British intelligence in opposition to underground criminal organizations, led
by Professor Moriarty of Sherlock Holmes fame. Th e list of literary characters that form
this organization is quite varied but the team is mainly composed of Mina Harker (Drac-
ula), Captain Nemo (from the novels of Jules Verne), Allan Quatermain (King Solomon’s
