Comic Book / Mystery Men

Five men (and one woman) of mystery

That smell in the air is the stench of burning bridges. There's no turning back.

— Dennis Piper, The Operative

The year: 1932. The situation: Alice Starr, a famous Hollywood actress, has just been murdered. And five extraordinary people are going to find out why.

The first is Dennis Piper, Badass Normal who moonlights as the cat burglar known as the Operative. The second is the ghostly figure known as the Revenant, a black man cloaked in the white garb of an apparation, whose feats of wizardry confuse and terrify the criminals he fights. The third is Sarah Starr, the sister of the murdered woman, who is currently working on an innovative jetpack design, and later uses it to become the flying heroine known as the Aviatrix. The fourth is the cruel and unsettling individual known as the Surgeon, who fights crime in most horrifying fashion and dissects his opponents when grilling them for information. The fifth is Dr. Lewis Green, who learns to use the power of a long-lost trojan bracelet to gain the powers of the legendary hero Achilles - but at the cost of losing a year of his life each time that can only be regained by taking the life of another.

Together, these five mystery men will learn the truth about Alice's death and put a stop to a scheme that may endanger thousands of innocent lives.

Mystery Men is a 2011 miniseries introducing five new Retraux-styled characters to the Marvel canon, inspired by old pulp fiction characters such as Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op, The Rocketeer and Mandrake the Magician, but with a modern twist.

Not to be confused with the movie of the same name, or with the similarly named hero team in Flaming Carrot, which the movie was based on.

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The series provides examples of the following tropes:

• Abhorrent Admirer: A non-romantic example, the Surgeon began his career because he was inspired by the heroes he read about in the papers, including the Operative and the Revenant. When he finally meets them, his extreme methods and seeming Lack of Empathy astonish them to the point where they refuse to let him join them.
• Abusive Parents: The General trained Dennis his whole life to become a soldier, constantly throwing him into brutal training regimes.

• Alliterative Name: Sarah Starr.

• Arson, Murder, and Admiration: The General says the following line about Nox's children (though this being the General, all the words may well be meant as compliments:
  General: They are vile... terrible... beautiful.
• Bad Boss: The General murders a remarkable number of his own underlings during the series.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Somewhat; the plan to demoralize the nation through the murder of the Lindbergh boy succeeds, even if they didn't actually go through with it and the rest of the children are safe thanks to the mystery men.
• Big Bad: Turns out to be Nox, a Fear Lord from the pages of Doctor Strange.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • The Surgeon and Achilles show up unexpectedly in the middle of Issue #4 to save the main trio from Lysseus.
  • Sarah has a knack for doing this.
• Bond One-Liner: The Surgeon is full of these.
  Surgeon: Let's slice through your hesitation.
• Boring, but Practical: The Revenant asks the Operative for a plan. The Plan: Beat up every cop till there's no more left.
  Revenant: THAT'S your big idea?
  Operative: Why not? It's always worked before!
• Breaking the Fellowship: The team's brief partnership dissolves at the beginning of Issue #5, with only Achilles and The Surgeon staying together.
• Bullying a Dragon: Dennis has the audacity to go into a cop bar and complain about how every single cop in the city is on the take, which one cop points out. Not that it ends up mattering in the least.
• Card-Carrying Villain: The General, beyond everything else he does, also says to Nox when she asks him to give up every vestige of morality and humanity for the sake of their Evil Plan, that he's simply been waiting for her to ask.
• Cast from Lifespan: Achilles loses a year of his life for every day he uses his powers. On the other hand, he regains a year of life for every person he kills as Achilles. His fights thus tend to be bloodbaths.
• Casual Danger Dialogue:
  • The Revenant and Aviatrix's dialogue in Issue #4 sounds downright flirtatious.
  • The Operative's only response to seeing the Aviatrix's new guns destroy the hellhounds is "those guns are new, right?"
• Charles Atlas Superpower: The Revenant's powers of prestidigitation allow him to catch a bullet with his teeth.
• Cool Mask: The Operative's outfit includes one to help him stand out from being just a guy in a dark suit. Marvel Comics #1000 reveals it's more than cool, in fact - It's the Mask of Eternity, which allows its wearer to be as Strong as They Need to Be for any fight.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: All of the board is this, but special mention must go to the one who objects to sacrificing a mob of children to a Satanic Archetype - because there's no profit in that.
• A Day in the Limelight: Issue #1 is the Operative's. #2 is the Aviatrix's. Issue #3 is this for both the Surgeon and Achilles. Issue #4 shows the Revenant's backstory.
• Deadpan Snarker: When he's not doing his Revenant voice, Zeke has a penchant for doing this. So does Sarah, especially if she thinks the boys are underestimating her. However, Dennis has them both beat.
  The Operative: The way I'm crashing through windows this week, I ought to invest in a glass factory!
• Deal with the Devil: Well, with a Fear Lord, actually.
• Dirty Cop: Apparently, every cop in New York during the time this story takes place.
• Doomed Hometown: The Surgeon's hometown is destroyed by the General.
• The Dragon: The General serves as this to Nox, the real Big Bad.
• Dramatis Personae: Every issue starts with a recap page with one of these.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Platonic version, but the one time the Surgeon shows any humanity at all is when giving an eulogy for his fallen friend, Achilles.
• Evil Makes You Ugly: The General, big time.
• Exact Words: Sarah Starr was barred from ever flying... an airplane. She has been working on a flying jetpack ever since then.
• False Reassurance: The blonde board member insists that he's very sorry about all the, you know, white slavery and such.
• Freudian Slip: The Operative accidentally calls Sarah 'Alice' at one point, despite knowing her for some time now.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Surgeon.
• Gallows Humor: The Surgeon, near-constantly. He also lampshades it and calls the trope by name when the Revenant and the Operative are trading darkly humorous jokes about Dennis' father.
• Ghostapo: Turns out Those Wacky Nazis were being aided by a Fear Lord all along! Who knew?
• Give Me a Sword: Achilles throws his sword to Dennis during the final battle.
• Glamour: The General seems to have this kind of effect when he wants to charm someone, particularly women. The reader only ever sees his true face, though.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: We're never shown how they all ended up finding and rescuing all the children, nor what became of Nox's plan.
• Hate Sink: The General, dear god. One of the first things we see of him is getting ready to have sex in a brothel with a girl that looks entirely too young to be there, only for that girl to be possessed and drained of life by a demon he's made a pact with, and he barely bats an eye.
• Hellhound: Nox apparently sired a whole pack of these with Cerberus.
• Historical Domain Character: One of the members of The Board — a conglomerate of union-busting, human-trafficking wealthy elite who profit off of those suffering under the Great Depression — just so happens to be Ayn Rand. "Enlightened Self-Interest" indeed.
• Hope Crusher: Part of the bad guys' Evil Plan was to do this to the entire United States.
• Human Sacrifice: The General and Nox's plan involves lots of these. In fact, the story is kicked off with one.
• Hypocritical Humor: Dennis' response to hearing a rich girl shouting about being robbed is "what a world, huh?"
• Implausible Deniability: Basically everything the cops do in their efforts to pin their crimes on Dennis.
  Dirty Cop: Remember for the report, men... I feared for my life. I had no choice but to use deadly force.
  • Also, in Ezekiel's backstory a cop arrested for sexually harassing a woman. Said woman was very clear it wasn't Zeke that did it, and said so to the cop while he arrested Zeke. The only justification he got was 'a black guy who likes to drink with white women is always guilty of something'.
• Just Like Robin Hood: The Operative is shown to be one of those, befitting the series' pulp aesthetic. Interestingly, it's never stated outright, but the first issue starts with him breaking into a rich man's building, then later goes inside a tenement and leaves a large wad of cash so that the occupants can pay the (recently raised by the landlord) rent. It's not hard to connect the dots.
• Lack of Empathy: The Surgeon is disturbingly detached from what he does (fitting his Idiosyncrazy as a doctor-themed vigilante), treating his every action like it's a medical operation, up to and including brutally dissecting a man.
• Lame Pun Reaction: Played for Drama when Dennis sees that the General chose to murder Alice in a boat called the Pied Piper. He's understandably pissed about the way his father appears to treat Alice's death like a joke.
• Love Triangle: There could have been one of these between Zeke, Dennis and Sarah, but the winner was settled before it ever had a chance to form.
• Loving a Shadow: It's implied this is the case with how Ezekiel and Dennis treat Sarah, the identical twin of the murdered Alice Starr. Dennis insists it's not the case, but the reader will probably feel otherwise.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The Revenants' magical feats seem supernatural enough, but the simple fact he looks like a man in a costume draws suspicion as to what's really going on - even more so when Dennis reveals that he used to work in a magic show (as an assistant, but still). The latter is revealed to be the truth in the Revenant's A Day in the Limelight issue.
• Missing Child: The son of Charles Lindbergh. Finding him is the focus of the latter half of the story.
• The Nameless: Perhaps because Nothing Is Scarier, neither the General or the Surgeon receive given names.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: If the General hadn't been so Stupid Evil as to want to murder Lewis just because he'd given him an Exposition Dump about the amulet, Lewis would have simply given him the amulet and he'd never have to worry about it again. At the very least, he should have waited to show his murderous intentions until AFTER Lewis handed it over.
• Nominal Hero: The Surgeon is described as teetering on the edge of being a hero, or the edge of sanity for that matter. Even the other mystery men can't stand his work.
• Obviously Evil: The General's eyes glow red, and he looks like a desiccated corpse.
• Odd Friendship: The Surgeon and Achilles become a duo due to their similar philosophies.
• Off with His Head!: The Operative kills Lysseus this way, using Achilles' sword.
• Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The General leads one of these, said to be controlling America's economy from the shadows.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: The General is transformed into a wolfman by a magical amulet.
• Painting the Medium: Zeke's speech bubbles. When he talks normally, they look the same as everyone else's. When he's trying to be dramatic for his Revenant persona, they have a white outline around them.
• Politically Correct History: Zig-Zagged. None of the heroes have any problem letting the Revenant, a black man, help them, aside from Dennis, and even then it's left up to the reader whether or not his standoffish nature toward Ezekiel is because of racism or simply due to I Work Alone. On the other hand, Dennis clearly holds sexist ideals such as believing a woman can't take care of herself, and so does Zeke. The Aviatrix does her best to disabuse them of such notions.
• [Popular Saying], But...: Quoth the Surgeon to one of his first victims: "I need you to remain still for the operation. But don't worry... you will feel everything."
• Purple Prose: The Revenant talks like this for dramatic effect.
• The Renfield: The General is reduced to this, a pathetic servant and yes-man for Nox without any capacity to fight back.
• Revenge: A key part of the heroes' motivations. The Operative, The Revenant and the Aviatrix want revenge for the murder of Alice Starr. Achilles and the Surgeon want revenge because the General ruined their lives.
• The Scapegoat: The General uses Piper as one for the murder of Alice Starr.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: This is part of the Surgeon's backstory, when he goes to give life-saving surgery to a man that was badly beaten by a corrupt sheriff's men. He is abandoned by his mother and gets his house burned down with him inside it for his trouble, but hey, at least now the sheriff's dead.
• Secret Identity Vocal Shift: May be the case for the Revenant, the Operative claims he has a 'fancy voice' he occasionally forgets to speak in. It may also be a reference to his use of antiquated, dramatic words. Either way, his speech bubble is shown with a white cover around it when he's doing it.
• Sequel Hook: The team still needs to find the Lindbergh boy, and Nox is still alive. The mystery men decide their work isn't done. And the Surgeon has taken Achilles' amulet, and it's implied he's keeping this a secret from the rest. Will we ever find out what became of all these plot threads? It's a real mystery, that's for certain.
• Shout-Out: The author's notes admit that the Operative's name is one to The Continental Op.
• Skewed Priorities: Sarah would sooner die than leave her lab.
• The Smurfette Principle: There is one girl among the five mystery men, and the same is implied to be the case for the General's group as well (he greets them with 'Gentlemen (and) madam'). At least until Nox is introduced.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: At first this is the case between Sarah, the Operative and the Revenant, and when Achilles and the Surgeon join up (or try to), things get even more complicated.
• Terror Hero: The Surgeon, if only because seeing what he does to people would horrify anyone into giving up a life of crime.
• That Man Is Dead: Subtly implied by the Dramatis Personae in every issue. Usually, after we're told the heroes' Secret Identities, they will be listed under their mugshots alongside their new aliases. This is not the case for The Surgeon; though his first appearance allows us to discover his real name is Rupert Kingsley, he is only ever listed as The Surgeon.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Baron Zemo shows up and becomes and ally of the bad guys.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Soundly averted by everyone on the good guy team.
• Transformation of the Possessed: Nox does this to her victims. Funnily enough, they end up looking only slightly worse than the General does.
• Unwanted Rescue: The Surgeon murders a few men accosting a woman affiliated with the Board, and she thinks this is what's happening.
  Woman: All the people in this city, and a costumed freak has to try to help me. They just wanted their payoff. I didn't need to be rescued.
  Surgeon: I'm not rescuing you. I'm abducting you.

• Tomato in the Mirror: Lewis Green is implied to have realized that he was the reincarnation of Achilles when he gained (regained?) his powers.
• War for Fun and Profit: The General's circle wants to cause World War II. They succeed, obviously.
• Would Hurt a Child: All of the bad guys see no qualm about sacrificing scores of children for power. The one guy who objects does so because there's no money in it for him.
• You Can't Go Home Again: The Revenant cannot, due to being forced into becoming a fugitive from the law.