“Warfare without Warning.” That’s the tagline for The Activity, a new spy thriller from Nathan Edmondson and Mitch Gerads that has taken everyone by surprise and has quickly become one of my most anticipated reads each month. Edmondson and Gerads have researched how our military’s special operations units work and created an incredibly realistic story about the teams that protect us, without us ever knowing it.

The Activity follows Team Omaha, a special operations unit whose job it is to clean up other people’s messes before they spark international incidents. Like a procedural television show, each issue covers one of the team’s missions, but also builds up the dynamics between the characters and pushes towards a larger threat that is menacing our heroes.

Edmondson deftly maneuvers between emotional character building, intense spy thriller, and fast-pace action movie, while Gerads delivers amazingly detailed and expertly paced artwork on every page.  While the story and characters are excellent, the creators have to get an extra special mention for the amount of research and detail that go into the book to make it incredibly realistic and accurate. Make sure you don’t miss out on The Activity; Issue #8 is a great point to jump in, as each issue tells a stand-alone story, but you can also pick up the newly released trade paperback, which collects Issues #1-5, so that you can get caught up on the story.