Anyone following along with my rundown of "clandestine government teams of occult investigators" may have noticed that I'm skipping a few well known examples. Am I being arbitrary? Probably, but it's my list, so sue me. I included the Guardians because I think they prefigure a lot of what came after, but they weren't a governmental agency, like most of the other examples on my list. But I skipped over "Mystery, Inc." (better known as Scooby Doo and friends) because they (a) aren't a government agency, (b) aren't "clandestine", and (c) don't really investigate the occult, but are instead a publicly known independent outfit that debunks the supposedly paranormal. (And don't quote me later examples of the team actually finding monsters or ghosts or whatnot. To me, that's just rank heresy.) I've left out Ghostbusters because Doctors Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler for similar reasons.

I'm also leaving out things like the MIB from the Men in Black films, because they really don't do much "occult investigating," but instead simply police aliens on Earth. And I'll be skipping over anything from The X-Files, since a pair of FBI agents working on their own doesn't really constitute a "team" (though I suppose a case could be made for including the shadowy government conspiracy from the series).

Why, then, am I including 2000 AD's "Vector 13"? Because I'm arbitrary, I suppose.


Vector 13 is kind of a corner case. The series which ran intermittently in the pages of 2000 AD from 1995 through 1998 is presented as the "Case histories of Vector 13," a clandestine goverment agency (just which government is never specified) that investigates the paranormal. There's a real kitchen sink approach in the stories, ranging from aliens to demons, from time-travel to cryptids. As Shaky Kane scripts in their first appearance in Prog 951, "Pay close attention. Everything strange is true."


Here's how the outfit was described in later issues.

Do you disbelieve?
Vector 13 is a covert Government agency which protects Earth from the truth of the universe. Stored in the Vector 13 case files are accounts of strange phenomena, ranging from the paranormal to the impossible. Every week V13's operatives, the legendary Men in Black, present a fresh case from these frightening files, full of declassified terrors. But whats is the truth and what is mere disinformation? That's for the Men in Black to know and you to find out.

As much territory as Vector 13 covered, though, they were never really much more than presenters, on the level of Cain and Abel in the old House of Secrets and House of Mystery comics, or even Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone. The Men in Black only rarely had any kind of agency (if you'll forgive the unintentional pun), seldom appearing in the stories themselves, and most often relegated to sitting in darkened rooms reviewing the actions of others. Each of the outings were self-contained shorts, in the tradition of the old "Future Shocks" and "Time Twisters" series, written and drawn by a Who's Who of mid-90s British comics creators--Dan Abnett, Peter Hogan, Nick Abadzis, Gordon Rennie, Shaky Kane, John Ridgway, Steve Yeowell, Chris Weston, et cetera, et al. Many of the stories are no better than you'd expect, but there's some real gems hidden in there, as well.

Labels: secret_services