Random Back Issues #114 - Legend of the Shield #2

Yep, that'll do it.

Joe Higgins passed his trial run with the Shield armor, which actually involved keeping the armor from being stolen by a big cyborg guy called Mann-X. Now it's time for his first mission: rescuing some American hostages from the fictional Middle Eastern country of Bahkti. Except Higgins is having weird dreams about what seems to be the original Shield, fighting in Korea, possibly.

He won't open up about them to anyone, even his best friend, Lt. Devon Hall, so Hall decides to get ready for his briefing with Higgins' father, a brigadier general. He's a bit early and sees a dossier on the desk. It's not about the mission, but about the fact the general made up charges to get his son court-martialed and busted to sergeant so he could be used in the Shield project. I guess the Army wasn't willing to spare any officers for the job.

Hall doesn't get a chance to tell Joe before the mission, and the general's none-too-subtle that he knows Hall read something he wasn't meant to. Worse, the general arranged for the loan of a Major McGill from the Green Berets for the mission to Bahkti. Because General Higgins is a fucking lunatic. The type who threatens his ex-wife just because Joe visited her.

The mission starts well enough, as Joe's team use the element of surprise to rescue the hostages, while Devon's squad disable all the Bahktian helicopters except one. Just in case. But when Devon's group go to free the other group of hostages they were told about, they find nothing except a bunch of Bahktian soldiers.

While Joe's rigging explosives to blow the munitions dump and cover their tracks, Devon's wounded and pinned down by an entire angry squad. The explosion gives him a chance to get to the chopper he spared as a back-up, but McGill disabled it, too. So Devon's stuck trying to reach the original helicopter as the rest of the soldiers, Joe and the hostages lift off.

Unfortunately, Devon gets gunned down, and Joe can't hear the warning that his father railroaded him, either. Nice touch having the sound effects cover the speech balloons. Joe flips out and gets knocked unconscious by the other soldiers, but by next issue, he's a fugitive trying to figure out how to bring down his father.

{6th longbox, 120th comic. Legend of the Shield #2, by Grant Miehm (writer/artist), Mark Waid (writer), Jeff Albrecht (inker), Tom Ziuko (colorist), Albert Deguzman (letterer)}