Perfect Dark: Janus' Tears is a six part comic series written by Eric Trautmann, illustrated by Cold FuZion Studios, and published by Prima Games. Each part was released monthly from August of 2006 to January of the following year, with a trade paperback released later in March compiling all parts.
Story[]
According to the narration, the story takes place in 2020, six months after Perfect Dark: Initial Vector and a bit more than six months since the death of Jack Dark.
It is the era of the Hypercorporations, titanic and powerful business juggernauts that possess vast and possess vast wealth and resources. These organizations are so omnipresent that they can purchase entire countries and control field military forces (paramilitary "security personnel") which rival any modern government and army in the world.
A covert cold war churns beneath the surface of everyday life, with the average citizen none the wiser. The rival hypercorporations wage a terrible war for control of the world's markets--and the people who comprise those markets-- through their massive arsenals, both economic and paramilitary. This terrible conflict could determine humanity's future and the fates of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Corporations control everything. Everyone. Everywhere. With one exception.
Joanna Dark has trained since birth to become a bounty hunter, to follow in her father Jack Dark's footsteps. But that path ended abruptly with blood and gunfire with Joanna's father was killed.
Her father's murder has thrust Joanna into a world-within-a-world, the secretive, shadowy conflict between rival hypercorporations. Six months ago, she fought against the people that killed her father--agents of the sprawling, omnipresent dataDyne Corporation, the largest of the global hypercorps. Six months ago, she learned that her revenge would not be complete until dataDyne was a smoking ruin, removed forever from the face of the Earth.
Her violent vendetta forced Joanna into an alliance with the mysterious British-based Carrington Institute--run by its equally enigmatic founder, the eccentric genius Daniel Carrington. The Institute is the only force that stands against the shadowy dataDyne. Dedicated to destroying the Institute's main adversary, the former bounty hunter is now a lethal footsoldier on this new, clandestine battlefield, where information is ammunition, money buys deceit, and a cold war in the new world order is about to turn hot. Joanna has employed her deadly skills in a series of battles with dataDyne, in conflict zones around the globe -- from New York to China.
Two weeks ago, Daniel Carrington learned that there may be a dataDyne mole hidden within his Los Angeles offices and dispatched Joanna for her current mission--codenamed Janus' Tears. It has placed her working undercover posing as a disgraced operative with one last shot at redemption, undergoind a "probationary reevaluation exercise". Plunged into a maelstrom of intrigue, she seeks to unmask the traitor, to root out a mole lurking somewhere within the Institute's ranks, an operative feeding intelligence to the Institute's primary adversary--dataDyne. Her two suspects are Jackson Abbot, a computer programmer and analyst; and Miranda Sturgis, the Director of Security for the Los Angeles Carrington Institute facility.
In the last twelve hours, this "quiet" undercover mission has turned bloody. A secretive mercenary team, the Hawk Team--a fearsome corporate mercenary squad of shadowy warriors who undertake the dirtiest jobs and leave behind no traces, and no survivors--have assaulted the L.A. Institute offices. The surprise attack by the mysterious enemy commandos nearly kills one of Joanna's suspects, computer programmer Jackson Abbot, and puts her on a collision course with her second, and most dangerous, target--Miranda Sturgis. Joanna defeats the team of high-tech mercenary commandos, leaving a dozens of enemy combatants dead on the streets of L.A. but sustains an injury that places her in the Institute's hospital facility.
While recovering from her injuries, she awakens from tormented fever-dreams in the hospital wing, and she struggles to piece together who she can trust. Evidence that the mole is targeting Joanna for eliminations mounts, until she is attacked by a mysterious gunman who tries to kill her in her hospital bed. Fending off the attack, Joanna arms herself, and sets off in pursuit of the would-be assassin.
The assassin is David Roarke--a former Navy SEAL, and a survivor of the Hawk Team assault. A running gun battle ensues throughout the facility as Joanna pursued Roarke into the heart of the complex--the Datacore, a massive quantum-optical computer mainframe and the repository of many of the Institute's deepest, darkest secrets. Roarke sabotages the facility, and Joanna finds an unlikely ally--suspected traitor Jackson Abbot--who reveals that the killer may have been given access by a high ranking Institute official. Roarke's involvement is linked to Joanna's hunt for the mole, and she pursues the assassin. But before she can capture him, she is herself apprehended by Miranda Sturgis and her security troops, who mistakenly believe Joanna is responsible for the gunfire and chaos in the facility.
Planting a listening device in Sturgis' office, Joanna escapes into the underbelly of Los Angeles. With few leads and the mole seeking to eliminate her, Joanna is forced to regroup at hear safehouse, and steer clear of the L.A. offices, to avoid further attacks.. and the ire of Miranda Sturgis. Rearming herself, she sets out to track down Roarke, and force him to unmask the traitor once and for all. But before she can begin the hunt for the mole in earnest, she is tracked from her safehouse, and now, crouched in a filthy alley, she is about to face an entirely new kind of opponent.
Her hunt is complicated by Detective Max Conroy, an L.A.P.D. homicide investigator who is looking into the morning's carnage with the Hawk Team at the institute . On the surface, Conroy seems like a good cop in a bad town, frustrated by the increasingly free hand that the sprawling, omnipresent hypercorporations are allowed--and by just how far about the law the hypercorps have become.
As Joanna carves a swath through the local criminal underworld, seeking a lead on Roarke's location, Conroy proves helpful in her own hunt, until she soon realizes that Conroy is a dirty cop, and is instead leading her into a deadly ambush. Betrayal and deception mark this operation, and Conroy instead leads Joanna into Roarke's hands. Arriving at a corporate warehouse facility in the nearby City of Industry, Joanna is ambushed by Roarke's henchmen, and a number of military-grade battle-mecha--robotic combat machines known as Junebugs, capable of wiping out a rifle company. In the resulting face-off, Conroy is killed, Roarke is wounded, and Joanna is left to face a second wave of deadly combat 'bots.
Joanna survives the attack -- barely -- but Roarke, her only lead to unmasking the mole, escaped again. Even worse: Abbot revealed that, during his invasion of the Datacore, Roarke managed to steal a vast amount of sensitive information.
Before long, a new lead presented itself: Miranda Sturgis' sister. Joanna tracked Carmen Sturgis to her hospital room, but could not locate Carmen herself. Joanna realized that the room was a front, a dead drop for passing information to the enemy, including Joanna's own personnel file.
Now, the endgame of the mission is in sight, as Joanna races to confront Miranda Sturgis, the woman who has tried to kill her since she arrived in Los Angeles...
Cover Gallery[]
| Perfect Dark Series | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Games | Official | Perfect Dark • Perfect Dark (GBC) • Perfect Dark Zero | |
| Cancelled | Perfect Dark Core • Velvet Dark • Perfect Dark | ||
| Books | Initial Vector • Second Front | ||
| Comics | Graduation Day • Hunting Season • Hong Kong Sunrise • Janus' Tears | ||