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The story follows a group of easily-identifiable characters who all have very distinct personalities. Lt. Col. Franklin Clay is instantly recognizable in scruffy, swept-back hair, stubbly face and suit. He is the leader of the team. Corporal Jake Jensen is the hipster hacker, instantly recognizable by his Lennon-style frames, spiky hair and beard. Sgt. Carols “Cougar” Alvaarez is the quiet one - a Hispanic sniper in a cowboy hat. Sgt. Linwood “Pooch” Porteous is the African-American pilot, instantly recognizable by the fact that he is bald and black. And then there is Aisha, an Afghani loner who gives the team a certain amount of sex appeal. She is probably the single most original character in the series. The idea of a badass Afghani woman who dresses like a man and hangs out with the boys has an instant appeal to a relatively liberated America that views the treatment of women in countries like Afghanistan woefully behind the times. Under the Taliban, women were not allowed to attend university and forbidden to work outside the home. Being a vicious badass whom even the Losers can’t trust, Afghani Aisha comes across as something of a dream of feminist American comic book readers spoken through a British comic book author. The socio-political implications of the character are interesting, but don’t figure all that prominently into the series.

The story plays out over the course of five individual chapters that chart the squad’s journey over a good portion of the world. Though the overall story has a pretty clear beginning, middle and end, the series lacks a larger sense of structure that would suggest a clear vision for a 32 issue miniseries. Starting with the Ante Up chapter (in issues 1 -8) and following through to Endgame (in issues 26 -32,) the series lacks any coherent, overarching direction.

The story in Ante Up has a kind of earthbound grittiness that ends up being blown completely out of the water by the end of Endgame. Max’s ultimate vision of creating a single, global nation state seems a bit unrealistic considering his background, which firmly ties the villain into the very real and profoundly dark history of US black ops, shadowy foreign policy and sinister preoccupations of the CIA throughout the 20th century. While it’s nice to see some of the very real villainy of CIA influence oversees serve as the center of a popular piece of fiction, The Losers' lack of complexity compromises the very real concerns of U.S. foreign policy. It ends-up trivializing what the most important part of the story is trying to point out: the U.S. has done a lot of bad things to people over the years in its own best interest. The political implications of The Losers are lost in a shoddily rendered Hollywood-inspired action story.

As for the series’ primary artist “Jock,” the visual look of this early to-mid 2000s series looks a lot like a cross between the heavy ink work of an early ‘90s Mike Mignola, the sketchiness of that period’s Eddie Campbell and the overall dark stylishness of Timothy Bradstreet. While Jock is quite good at rendering a very iconic and distinct team, the action of the book feels very flat and static. When the action should be shooting across the page, it lays pretty flat, rendering a story as a series of well composed, but very lifeless, non-kinetic images. There are a few other artists who worked on the series, a few of them better than Jock, a few of them far worse. Visually, the series as a whole lacks a sense of consistency.

Overall, the 32 issues of the series would’ve made for kind of a strange narrative novel - not quite as long as Tom Clancy’s more voluminous work. It’s an interesting story in places. Those places happen to be very, very cinematic, which bodes well for a big-budget film adaptation...

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