Things are worth any wait when they’re the best they could possibly be, and the launch of Agents of Atlas’ ongoing last week was the equal of every year’s anticipation since their already-classic miniseries in 2006. These characters are rooted in the post-WWII realism that centered heroism on the common person who’d just saved the world right as the caped crusaders not uncoincidentally faded from popularity in print. We’d seen that supervillains could be toppled by ordinary folk making extraordinary effort, like Secret Agent Jimmy Woo; our taste in pop fiction turned to romance icons like Venus, unexplored worlds like Namora’s Atlantis, uncharted areas like Gorilla Man’s jungle and the only threats that still felt bigger than us, like Marvel Boy’s outer space and the uncertain future of mechanical intelligences like M-11. The Agents of Atlas cast retain the folkloric sturdiness of the fondly-remembered nursery — mermaid, goddess, spaceman, etc. — and the plausibility of what illusions were left for young adults who’d come through hell and left superheroes back with their adolescent innocence at the time this new comic’s characters were first published. As written by Jeff Parker, they take on three dimensions like few comic heroes have; there’s a narrative authority here that, as the Agents say about sole unpowered human member and team leader Jimmy Woo, makes readers follow Parker and new artist Carlo Pagulayan anywhere.

It’s the power of editor Mark Paniccia’s books in general and Parker’s in particular that I’m caring about “continuity” for the first time since my own long-gone teen years; I’ve been dying to know how the Agents’ anonymity squares with Namora’s conspicuous alliance with the Hulk’s revolution in Greg Pak’s run on that book, and in Issue 1 the Agents’ entire timeline is sorted out with one of the deftest expository scenes on record, as new master-of-the-world Norman Osborn flaunts his intelligence-gathering to tell Venus what he knows about her group. The status-quo 2.0 of the team having taken control of a shadowy world-guiding agency of their own is handled fascinatingly, with the fairytale promise of all those old-school hidden-society movie-serials brought to full bloom. Between dazzling globe-hopping action sequences and great character-driven interludes, the true story here is the compromises of power and the need to make the right decision the first time while using spy techniques and reserving worldshaking force. We’ve now got an endlessly optimistic, sternly resourceful guy in charge of the real world’s powder keg just like the relentlessly decent, steel-nerved Jimmy Woo at the top of his secret empire, and each drama’s gonna be worth watching every minute of.

Speaking of widescreen crises and undercover saviors from a classic era, I picked up the most ambitious indie sci-fi/superhero saga in recent memory at the New York Comic Con this weekend. The Outer Space Men GN is based on the legendary late-1960s toy line, and sets the bar star-high for planet-spanning adventures and clashes of great ideas. The bendable action figures, one from each world in our solar system but Earth and Mercury, came with smart background synopses on their packages and launched a thousand stories in the imaginations of their young fans. They also each orbited slightly under the copyright radar of a famous 1950s sci-fi monster — “man from Pluto” Electron+ was The Man From Planet X; “man from Uranus” Orbitron was the Metaluna mutant from This Island Earth, etc. — a fact unknown to us kids and delightful as we grew into adulthood amidst the postmodern mash-up. From the humble raw materials of pop homage creator Mel Birnkrant came up with one of the first groups of pop archetypes.

It stuck in the mind of marketer Gary Schaeffer like a suppressed alien abduction, and he licensed the characters’ rights and got scripter Eric C. Hayes and artist Rudolf Montemayor to work on a GN. The result is a spectacular philosophical page-turner, a popcorn blockbuster on paper. The Outer Space Men are an interplanetary council who neutralize threats to the solar system like a raygun-wielding U.N. with extreme prejudice yet cool, alien calculation. In this first of a series of GNs they face a threat from within the Earth itself that its surface inhabitants know nothing of; there’s a hidden race at the planet’s core whose origin is an ingenious device I’ll leave to new readers to discover but which affords an engrossing modern take and meta-scientific spin on the origin of demon legends from Milton’s Hell to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. Refreshingly, the Outer Space Men are unhesitant and unapologetic interventionists; at the end of Frank Miller’s DK2 he has Superman and Batman decide that they are gods who should start acting like it for everyone’s good, but no one in comics ’til now has followed through on both the grand and scary implications of that attitude.

Wisely, Hayes has drawn as much on astrology as astronomy, using at least as much mysticism as science and likening the cast not so much to a pantheon as is often done with the JLA but to the zodiac, in which of course the protagonists’ home planets all figure and which represents not the heavens’ ruling class but their natural order. Consequently, we get a novel Darwinian interpretation of very cerebral characters’ attitudes and actions. The Outer Space Men may be highly evolved, but they understand their place in the evolutionary scheme, and the conflicting impulses of their varied planetary species play out in intriguing ways on a quest to maintain a solar system-wide sustainability more important than any individual life involved — which very much includes the opponents’ lives they dispatch and the lives of their own they unhesitantly gamble. Rather than the timeworn team-member friction we see in many ensemble superhero strips, these characters are like an uneasy yet ultimately complementary ecological system in microcosm, even including their main antagonist Mystron, who is repeatedly described, unfavorably yet matter-of-factly, as simply and immutably following his nature. With locales that conjure everything from Kubrick to Dante, this book bursts with imagination, and Montemayor’s art translates the once well-known toy figures’ physiques and personalities into plausible and workable modern interpretations.

The book has its share of dialogue malapropisms, occasionally weak anatomy, and transitions which fall flat or are confusing due to momentarily under-prepared exposition or over-intricate art. But for the most part, the GN’s ambitious 150 pages (with a bizarrely brilliant, almost Beat-poetry-style introduction by creator Birnkrant) have a range of current-events and fantasy-canon sources, character-shading, pulp pacing, visual scope and fullness and a palette of fantastic environments that take readers where no comic has gone before and make them want to sign up for as many tours as this team can envision. [www.theouterspacemen.com]