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In the opening issue of the comic book Velvet, the secretary to the director of an elite British spy agency decides to go digging into the mysterious death of a secret agent. This, she learns, is a mistake, and soon enough she finds herself standing over a dead body, and framed for murder. “This is as bad as it gets, secretary,” says one of the armed men who bursts in to arrest her. “No,” she answers, “it isn’t.” Seconds later, every secret agent in the room is writhing on the floor, and she’s leaping out the window in a stealth suit.
Turns out this isn’t a story about Moneypenny, the secretary waiting for James Bond behind a desk at MI6. It’s a story that asks, what if a 40-something secretary was secretly James Bond all along?
Although writer Ed Brubaker has a long history of scripting espionage and crime comics—including the award-winning Criminal—he and Velvet artist Steve Epting are probably best known for their work on Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the comicbook story that inspired the recent blockbuster film. (Brubaker even made a brief cameo as a scientist experimenting on the Winter Soldier.)
For Velvet, which comes out in its first collected edition today, Brubaker wanted to avoid superpowered overtones and play it straight with a Cold War-era story about a spy that nobody sees coming, even—or especially—all the spies around her.
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Brubaker has been toying with the idea for Velvet for almost eight years. He first came up with the concept while watching an episode of the late 1970s British spy drama The Sandbaggers, where the head of MI6 goes looking for a new secretary.
“You realize through the interview process how qualified the person needs to be in order to be the right hand of the person running the agency,” Brubaker says. “They have to know everything he needs to know, and weed out the stuff that’s not important. They end up being one of the most knowledgeable, important people in the agency, and yet they’re just looked at by the rest of the world like the secretary outside Don Draper’s office.”
When he considered most spy movies and novels, he realized that they tended to look at female characters in the same way: as secretaries sitting behind desks, ornamental Bond girls, or sexualized villains. “It just seemed like such bullshit,” says Brubaker. But for him, it was bullshit that came with a silver lining: “There was so much fertile ground there to explore.”
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Part of Brubaker’s interest in espionage comes from a family history in spycraft. “My uncle was in the CIA and my dad was pretty high up in naval intelligence during the ’60s and early ’70s,” he says. “I grew up going to family events and hearing all these crazy stories about Vietnam. Nobody thought we were listening but we were soaking it all up. Whenever my dad would take me to spy movies, he would tell me afterwards all the stuff that was totally incorrect. He’d point me to the spy books that he thought got it right.”
Velvet also finds her way to the world of espionage though a family connection. Although she grows up primarily at a boarding school in Switzerland, we learn that during holidays with her father, a World War II-era diplomat, she would read through his files after he fell asleep, learning about the spy operations of WWII—and the incredible women involved with them.
“I didn’t want there to have to be some tragedy in Velvet’s life that made her want to be a spy, like terrorists killed her father or something,” says Brubaker. “I like the idea of a little girl going through her dad’s stuff and finding out there are women spies who are these awesome fucking heroes, and wanting to be like that. That’s totally what you’d do if your dad were a diplomat during WWII—wait till he passed out and dig through his shit. That’s what I’d do.”
— Ed Brubaker
Although most of Velvet’s work as a spy took place in the ’50s and ’60s, when we meet her as a secretary (and we still don’t know why she’s a secretary) it’s the early ’70s—not coincidentally, the era when the feminist revolution went mainstream. She’s in her mid-40s, and no one around her—save the director and a handful of others—have any idea about her past.
“I loved the idea of flipping the typical male-oriented spy story, and doing one about a woman who was also a mature, middle-aged woman,” says Brubaker. He saw the character’s age as fundamental to the story; it helped cement her as mature, seasoned rather than a vulnerable young woman-in-danger, and it allowed her to have a deeper, richer history as a spy. “In the espionage field, it totally makes sense that someone could have a secret history; they could have a job for 20 years that turns out to be a front, basically,” says Brubaker. “But it has to be someone who’s lived a real life.”
When he started pitching the concept as a TV pilot, however, Velvet’s age turned out to be more controversial than expected. “The notes that we got from everybody were that she needed to be 25, and an agent-in-training learning from the cool male secret agent. I was just like ‘OK, this is… just appalling to me,’” Rather than a character that had lived a real life, they wanted a woman 20 years younger, stripped of Velvet’s expertise and maturity. “Imagine Taken, if Liam Neeson’s character were 30,” he adds. “It’s just not the same movie.”
Brubaker recalls one of his favorite actors, Diane Lane, talking about how all the good roles seemed to evaporate after she turned 40, leaving nothing but moms or jilted wives left for younger women. “How is it possible that nobody wants to write an amazing part for a woman that’s not basically a kid? Most of the [male] actors we see in the world are in their 40s, or late 30s,” he says. “You don’t see the person who chose to be James Bond but also happens to be a woman.”
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As one might expect in a story about an aging spy, Velvet is a story that’s interested in aftermath. It deals not just with what happens to the spies during their thrilling missions, but what happens to them afterwards: how they survive after they survive.
In a later issue, Velvet goes searching for the killer of a handsome, Bond-esque British spook, and tracks the wife of a Yugoslavian general, a woman the spy once seduced for information. She soon learns that the woman was sent to languish in a brutal prison for her betrayal. “That was me thinking, what happens to the women who get seduced by spies and give up state secrets?” Brubaker says. “We never see them again, but what happens to them after the spies go home? They’re probably in prison waiting to die.”
The untold stories of women like that general’s wife—and Velvet—are missed opportunities to Brubaker. “The unexplored perspective is always the more interesting,” he says. “If I wanted to write an Encyclopedia Brown story, I’d write it from the point of view of Sally. If I wanted to write a Sherlock Holmes story, I’d write it from the point of view of Watson.”
For many of the WWII-era female spies whom Brubaker researched, leaving the world of espionage was particularly difficult because returning to “normal” life also meant returning to the social limitations that circumscribed the lives of women at the time. He mentions The Bletchley Circle, a British television drama about female codebreakers from World War II and their struggle with settling down as housewives after the war.
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“They want excitement; they want that part of their life back,” he says. “They were integral to winning the war, but they can’t even tell anybody because it’s part of the Official Secrets Act. So nobody knows how awesome they really are.”
Brubaker conjures a very superheroic metaphor to illustrate the idea: “What if you had superpowers, and then they suddenly they went away? Life would suck after that, because you used to be able to fly,” he says. “It’s that idea of having to go back to normal life after doing something bigger than that. That’s part of being a mature, mid-40s character, and what a lot of what mid-life crises are about. Those points in your life where you think, did I peak?”
After a destructive high speed chase that ends with numerous men in the hospital and Velvet on the run, we see a bruised and battered spy puffing on a cigarette, trying to make sense of it all. “Just who exactly is she, sir?” he asks. “Because she sure as hell isn’t any secretary.” Cut to a picture of Velvet, smiling as she speeds away on a stolen motorcycle.
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