Secret agent Jack Steele is cut from the same cloth as another famous British secret agent — including all the same proclivities from dueling over-the-top villains with delusions of grandeur to fine single beverages to the latest in high tech gadgets and toys. He’s also the same love ’em and leave ’em type of guy — except that Jack has apparently left a string of illegitimate heirs across the years and world from his globe-trotting, world-saving adventures.
When Jack is killed in action, the British secret service turns to his illegitimate children in the hopes of crafting a team of agents with all the skills that Jack had — minus, of course, the rampant seduction of every member of the opposite sex who crosses their path. Brought together to fight a threat to world safety and peace, the team isn’t necessarily interested in saving the world, at first. Then someone kidnaps their mothers and the team has an incentive to work together and try to find out the mastermind behind the nefarious plot.
Collecting together the first several issues of The Illegitimates, the story told here is largely a throw away Bond-homage until the final two issues when a fairly interesting twist is thrown into things. I won’t reveal what it is here because it will ruin a lot of the fun of reading this collection, but I will say that it made me sit up and take notice of this comic collection in a way I hadn’t necessarily thought possible based on the first three and a half or so issues. In fact, I’d say those first couple of issues are largely fun, but not necessarily ground breaking with the most fun coming in the flashbacks to Steele and his liaisons with the various mothers of the children.
In the interest of full disclosure, I received a digital ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Nashville Book Worm 