Review by Lewis Savarese
A video game franchise’s lore, be it backstory or worldbuilding, is something most fans look forward to discovering as they play through each game in a series. If ever there was a video game franchise that could benefit from less lore, it would be IO Interactive’s Hitman series. Yet, with each passing game the story of clone contract killer Agent 47 and his handler Diana Burnwood becomes more complex. Enter Christopher Sebela and Ariel Medel’s Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman, an examination of Agent 47 and Diana’s origin stories. The poorly paced dual narratives coupled with lacklustre art makes for an unnecessary video game tie-in that buckles under the pressures of continuity.
The conceit of the Hitman games is simple: you control Agent 47 as he stealthily navigates open world environments, ranging from opera houses to race tracks, intent on eliminating targets and achieving objectives. Between missions there are cinematics that add to the Hitman lore, introducing us to Agent 47’s employer the International Contract Agency (ICA), his progenitor Dr. Ort-Meyer, or the scientific facility of his “birth.” Birth of the Hitman holds a unique place in the Hitman series, serving as the skeleton key to the 2016 franchise reboot, the World of Assassination trilogy. While comics are generally a safe medium for deploying retcons and reboots, Birth of a Hitman feels like a redundant cash grab. What becomes apparent upon further inspection of the book’s constant introduction of new characters, organisations, and locations to the Hitman franchise, is that these revelations are better suited to the video games themselves. In fact, many of the story beats eventually do resurface in the games.
The dual storylines focus on the separate, yet intertwined, formative years of Agent 47 and Diana Burnwood. We learn immediately that Agent 47 and another clone killer, Agent 6, are responsible for the death of young Diana’s parents. Her parents were targeted at the behest of Blue Seed Pharma, a company they were suing for the death of their son James. As Diana plunges headfirst into the criminal underworld on her quest for revenge against Blue Seed Pharma, Agent 47 begins to question his homicidal programming. Diana’s story is the more substantial of the two, which is irregular considering the book’s title. Her motivation carries more weight and her route to the ICA is compelling, compared to Agent 47’s cookie-cutter story of a creation turning against their creator. Unfortunately, Sebela slows all narrative progress to a crawl by crosscutting between the stories at short intervals and burdening Diana’s with a plodding narration.
Medel’s art is serviceable, but the opportunity to blend the visual language of the games with that of comics goes unexplored. A single panel resembles the instinct mode of the games, a greyscale filter where Agent 47 can see targets, items, and movements of NPCs throughout a level. However, the panel looks more like thermal imaging than a reference to the game mechanic. Peeking through keyholes, storing bodies in containers, and the white void motif are game concepts that would have translated well to comics art. There are however two staged accidental deaths, one of Agent 47’s trademark executions, that Medel depicts with elegance and brutality befitting the franchise.
Agent 47: Birth of a Hitman adds a negligible amount of depth to established characters and overwhelms the franchise with new lore. The art is consistent with mainstream comics, but does not engage with the visual language of the source material.
