Art Ops Vol. 1: How to Start a Riot

Reggie Riot is no one’s idea of a cultural savior. The latchkey child of a busy single mother, he’s grown up to be a resentful slacker whose idea of high culture is getting stoned and admiring the graffiti in the alley where he scores his weed.
 
His mother, however, is not your average working parent. She’s the head of a secret organization called Art Ops, whose mission is protecting the artistic treasures of the world—which have a lot more life in them than a casual observer might realize.
 
Reggie has always shunned his mom’s high-culture scene, but a devastating encounter with the shadowy forces menacing the world’s masterpieces has left him with a permanent expression of the chaotic power of art flowing through his very veins.
 
So when Art Ops itself suddenly vanishes without a trace, leaving its final rescue—La Gioconda, the Mona Lisa herself—out in the cold, it’s up to Reggie and his motley crew—including a masked super-powered operative who writes sitcom scripts on spec, a girls-just-wanna-have-fun ’80s music-video icon, and a suburban clerk from a mall-punk clothing chain—to come to the rescue.
 
But do they have what it takes to stand up to the dark side of human creativity?
 
From writer Shaun Simon (co-author of The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys with My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way) and artists Michael Allred (co-creator of iZOMBIE) and Matt Brundage (The Spirit: The New Adventures) comes ART OPS VOL. 1: HOW TO START A RIOT, collecting issues #1-5 of the ongoing VERTIGO series and featuring a special sketchbook section from Allred and Brundage.

Shaun Simon is a musician and comics writer. With Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance, he is writing the Dark Horse Comics series The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. He also wrote a short story in the VERTIGO: CYAN anthology. ART OPS is his first series.

Michael 'Doc' Allred grew up in the 60s and 70s and was surrounded with the best in pop culture and a steady diet of music, movies and comic books. Allred first tasted success in comics with his wildly popular MADMAN series, which is being developed as a live action film with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. His earlier work from GRAFIK MUZIK was turned into the cult hit movie G-Men from Hell directed by Christopher Coppola (featuring Robert Goulet as the Devil). Other work includes Red Rocket 7, his history of Rock and Roll told in the context of a sci-fi adventure story, the Madman spin-off THE ATOMICS, and his magnum opus, THE GOLDEN PLATES, where he's illustrating the entire Book of Mormon. He is the co-creatore of the Vertigo series iZOMBIE, soon to be a TV series on the CW.