There’s a new T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents out.

I really liked Wally Wood’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents back in the day; it had a combination of a retro feel to the art and characters and a modern sensibility to the setting — the characters were costumed heroes but they worked for a government agency.

The new one retains the essential idea (as far as I can tell) but provides somewhat more focus on the “your powers are going to kill you” aspect. It reminds me of Strikeforce: Morituri, where the heroes are trading off their lives to get increased power in order to fight the good fight.

The missed opportunity is in regards to DC’s iPad app, and comes in two flavors.

First is an amateur-hour miss. They haven’t set up a synonym for “T.H.U.N.D.E.R.” and “thunder” (or any cased variation). This means that when I searched for “Thunder Agents” a couple of days ago I got no results. Typing all of those periods is a pain in the butt – for this post, I only typed them once and then copied that string. And that’s with a real keyboard – the iPad keyboard is really nice but still far inferior to the real thing.

I initially assumed that the lack of results was due to me searching before the street date of the comic, but when I went back today and search again and still got no results, it occurred to me that they might have missed the synonym, so I tried “agents” and sure enough, there it was. 10-page digital preview.

Which brings me to the second, more serious, miss.

I can’t buy the darned thing. They’ve gone to the effort of digitizing it and putting in the pan-and-zoom features for the first 10 pages, but not the remaining work to finish the last 12 pages (or however many) and make it available for sale. Instead, I’m directed to “buy it in print at your local comic shop.” I buy plenty of books at my local comic shop, but in this case I was actually interested in getting it digitally, and DC missed the chance to sell it to me. I honestly don’t know what they are thinking.