The acronym (The Higher United Nations Enforcement Reserves) may connote a multi-national agency, but when you get down to it, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (DC Archives) were an all-American group. A short-lived superhero series from the mid-sixties, the Agents came out under the previously unknown Tower Comics imprimatur: three years after Marvel launched its line with the first issue of Fantastic Four. Today, the Tower line is fondly recalled by Silver Age comic book aficionados, less for its characters and stories and more for the quality of its art.

Tower's line of superhero books was overseen by the great Wallace Wood, a troubled but gifted artist known among fans for his EC s-f and Mad comics, plus his work on early issues of Marvel's Daredevil. A dynamic and detailed cartoonist with a flair for rendering zaftig pinup babes, Wood tended to flit from assignment to assignment, much to the consternation of his fans (his run on Daredevil, though it changed the look of the character for the better, only lasted six issues). With a coterie of comic pros (Reed Crandall, Gil Kane, Dan Adkins, Mike Sekowsky), Wood put his visual stamp on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and its offshoots. The result was a line of superhero books that instantly looked great - even if the stories didn't always approach the same level of visual presentation.

I was unprepared by DC Comics' recent hardcover reprint of this series. The comics company has been doing a strong job respectfully reprinting many of its superhero series as 200-plus page hardbound Archives - including a few works from outside the DC line like Will Eisner's Spirit or the first Mad comics - but I'd have thought that the company would've gone for one of its as-yet-unprinted series (Superboy, say) before settling on this relatively obscure batch of books. I'm not complaining, mind you, just more than a little surprised.

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents was Tower's flagship superhero title, a large 68-page book (most comics typically ran half that size) sold on newsstands for a quarter. Its lead was a superlunk named Dynamo, who received cover prominence and two stories per issue. Premise behind the book was fairly simple: a brilliant scientist is murdered by enemy agents, leaving behind three prototype inventions: an "electron intensifier" belt, invisibility cloak plus a cybernetic helmet capable of "magnifying a man's brain power several times over." Each device is given to a single agent; it's the belt that transforms amiable everyman Leonard Brown into dynamo. Once he fires his Thunderbelt, it adapts to his metabolism and becomes fatal to anyone else who tries to wear it. In one episode, an enemy agent is vaporized after putting on the captured Dynamo's belt.