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Cast your mind back to 1996, when Mission: Impossible wasn’t yet a successful multi-movie franchise but just a summer blockbuster based on an old 1960s TV show, starring an actor known for projects like Eyes Wide Shut and the 1994 movie version of Interview with the Vampire. Faced with the prospect of building an audience for the first Mission: Impossible film, Paramount Pictures relied on a secret weapon: its burgeoning comic book imprint at Marvel Comics.

Few people remember the 1996 Mission: Impossible comic book, and with good reason; it’s not a particularly good issue, despite a couple of heavy hitter creators being involved. Both stories in the one-off special issue — ‘Through a Mirror Darkly’ and ‘Should Any of Your Agents…’ — are written by Marv Wolfman, known for his New Teen Titans and Crisis on Infinite Earths work at DC, while the cover for the issue (and interior art on ‘Should Any of Your Agents…’) came from none other than Rob Liefeld himself.

Liefeld was, he’s since revealed, requested by Tom Cruise himself to contribute the cover for the issue, even though Marvel didn’t have likeness rights to make Ethan Hunt look like Cruise. (“I gave the original cover to Tom,” Liefeld wrote back when Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning came out.) 

Liefeld’s cover is the main reason anyone remembers the issue today; Mission: Impossible #1 was one of only three non-Star Trek projects released by Marvel’s Paramount Comics imprint during its brief two-year existence from 1996 through 1998, with the entire line little more than obscure oddity to most contemporary fans. (The other non-Star Trek titles were an animated series tie-in called The Mighty Heroes, and the one-off Escape from New York sequel, The Adventures of Snake Plissken, if you’re curious.)

Nonetheless, it’s worth hunting down in back issue bins for any big Mission: Impossible fans out there — where else do you get the back story about why Ving Rhames’ Luther got disavowed from the IMF in the first place?

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