Force Works, Except When it Doesn't.

Nov 16

Nov 16 Force Works, Except When it Doesn't.

The concept of Force Works began with the end of the flagging title Avengers West Coast. After 102 issues, the Avengers spin-off was cancelled in January of 1994. The going idea at the time was that the current formula wasn’t working because the west coast roster wasn’t very closely connected to their sister series. The solution? Rebranding the series with the exact same cast, a terrible name, and lean harder into the comic book tropes that were being popularized by Image Comics at the time. Everything had to be more extreme in those days and so rather than just revamping the existing title they turfed it for a brand new one. It was a monumentally stupid idea that even DC Comics copied a few months later with Extreme Justice, only in the latter case they at least kept the ties to the Justice League family of books.

At its surface level it seems like they were going for “X-Force, but the Avengers” and didn’t settle on calling them A-Force (an idea that didn’t strike until nearly 2 decades later in 2015!) The series tried to make the characters involved more edgy. The characters got a super-high tech headquarters with the type of cybernetic virtual reality McGuffin brand impossible technologies that flooded any book associated with Jim Lee at the time. The team became proactive instead of reactive and hitting things harder and faster than the Avengers ever did. This wasn’t the only title that they were doing this with, as the Fantastic Four were getting their own spin-off series Fantastic Force which tried to do virtually the same thing.

Anyway, the entire series was co-written by Dan Abnette and Andy Lanning. The pair got their starts over at Marvel UK and were part of the team that brough to life many of the UK properties like Knights of Pendragon, Death’s Head II, and Genetix, so all the cyberpunk esthetic with all the impossible tech and cyborgs and the melding of science and technology all makes sense because making these type of 90’s shit sandwiches was what Marvel UK excelled at.

The first few issues were drawn by Tom Tenney. There is not a lot out there by this guy. After doing some work for Eclipse, Now, and other indie publishers he got a bit of a break at both Marvel and DC. He only did a handful of issues for each of the big two and then poof, he was gone. While his work is rich and crammed with detail, I can say I am just not a fan. His work kind of looks like what would happen if you amalgamated 70s Jack Kirby with 90s Jae Lee. Everyone has chiseled features but everyone has that insane amount of line work where everyone looks like they are constantly scowling and every line of their face has been traced with mascara. He often draws characters with noodly arms and mouths that have teeth by no lips. I can respect that a lot of work went into the four issues he did, but its just not my scene.

Then you had fill in artists for an issue or two: Paul Ryan, David Taylor, Stu Johnson. It’s not until issue #9 through 12 that we get an artist I really like, Jim Calafiore. Then we get two fill in issues with art by David Ross. They then put Jim Cheung on the book and this was really early in his career. Everyone looks like they have tiny baby faces on oversize heads. As the series was getting close to cancelation we had the awesomely named Yancy Labat brought on between issues drawn by Hector Olivera. The last issue was drawn by Andrew Wildman, who you might remember did the last few dozen issues of Transformers back when Marvel had the license. Always a fan of his work as well.

Anyway, the thing is, through its very short 22 issue run, Force Works had a total of 10 different artists all with wildly different styles. This lack of consistency made the book hard to read because the art style frequently kept changing and the role was being filled by people who were new or breaking into mainstream comics and not many of them went on to do anything all that interesting.

So how does the book fare? Dreadfully if you ask me. The first issue really sets the tone for how bad this title is.

To prove how IN YOUR FACE this book was going to get the first issue not only introduced the new team (easy to do when you’re recycling the cast from the book you just cancelled), killed off Wonder Man, and crammed in two new(ish) brand new villains, the Kree Starstealth and the hive creatures known as the Scatter. In the middle of all of this it also introduced a new character named Century, a composite alien creature with a mysterious past that used both magic and technology, just a huge pile of derivative ideas vomited up into a blender and set to puree.

If that’s not enough 90s for you, the first issue featured one of the most absurd cover gimmicks of the era. While most books were satisfied doing the holofoil thing, Force Works #1 tried something different: A pop-up cover.

The front cover folded open and a battle scene could be blossomed out with a pop up image of Wonder Man being swarmed by Kree soldiers. Marvel has attempted to reproduce this special feature in their digital editions of Force Works #1, but it doesn’t really capture how ridiculous this looked in real life.

Needless to say, nobody did this again after this failed attempt and I don’t blame them. This could not have been cheap to produce and it just looks downright fragile.

The series suffered from what a lot of what other comics of this era suffered from: A lack of character development. Not necessarily for the main cast — although they had long been developed so there was no heavy lifting required — but with regards to the supporting cast and the brand new villains introduced during the series. The Starstealth were not much different than the Lunatic Legion, the Scatter were mindless drones, the Mandarin’s Avatars were cookie cutters of Asian stereotypes and common super-power tropes. The only thing that really got some development was the nation of Slorenia which was prominently featured in Force Works #4, 5, 11, and 12. The region was an allegorical country that was meant to stand in for the real world genocide that occurred during the Bosnian War which was happening around the time this series was published. However, the allegory becomes muddied when the fictional people and nation are given clunky and silly names like Tblunka and Dudak and so on.

It was almost like the creators on this title were allergic to character development. This is best exemplified by the fact that Century — whose whole existence was a big mystery — wouldn’t get his back story fleshed out in Force Works, but in a one-shot. Like you couldn’t have made that an issue of Force Works?

I will give credit where credit is due though. One of the reasons why Avengers West Coast was cancelled was because it wasn’t interconnecting to related titles. The rationale being that an Avengers book should be inter-connected with its related titles. This was corrected with Force Works. However, rather than being an Avengers adjacent book, Force Works was considered part of the Iron Man family of books which included War Machine. The three titles all had Force Works branding during the books run, even though War Machine was never really a member of the team, so they couldn’t even do that right.

I suppose what’s really odd about Force Works is its legacy. At the time it was being published, Marvel was hitting new heights with animated shows based on their properties. Trying to repeat the success of the X-Men cartoon, Marvel also produced the Marvel Action Hour. It was an hour block of programming featuring cartoons based on the Fantastic Four and Iron Man. The bizarre thing about the Iron Man cartoon is that it actually included its own version of Force Works. The team was nearly identical except for the absence of US Agent. Instead they had both War Machine and Hawkeye as part of the team. While this may be baffling to modern fans, if you take a look at the context of the state of Marvel Studios Animation at the time, all of the cartoon properties were had the characters appear in kid friendly versions of what were in the comics at the time. X-Men was very much influenced by the 90’s era of the franchise, so Iron Man followed suit and that’s how a boring character like Century ended up in a Saturday morning cartoon over many other more deserving Marvel characters.

Other than that, Force Works has not left much of a legacy with Marvel. I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that its major stories were swept under the rug because they were tied in to The Crossing. The group and its activities are seldom mentioned anywhere, which is not surprising given their short lived status. However, there was a ever so brief attempt at reviving the team. Following Civil War and the advent of the 50-State Initiative, saw an attempt to create government sponsored superheroes in every American State. The group in Iowa was named Force Works. They were briefly mentioned in two issues, namely Civil War #6 and Iron Man: Director of SHIELD #33. However, like many of the teams that were created as part of the 50-State Initiative, they weren’t very well fleshed out and quickly dropped as Marvel moved on to bigger and better things post-Civil War.

Other than the pre-established cast of characters, almost none of the new characters or villains introduced in this series has done much of anything. Time of this writing (November, 2022) Century who had briefly returned in New Avengers Annual (vol. 2) #1 and Avengers Annual (vol. 2) #1 as part of the Revengers, a team of disgruntled former Avengers. The character was since relegated to joke status appearing in a Deadpool story in Marvel Comics Presents (vol. 3) #6. Supporting cast member Suzie Endo has had a little better luck, reappearing in post Civil War Iron Man stories. She also appeared in the 6th volume of Silver Surfer back in 2011, but hasn’t been seen since.

These days, Force Works has been fully reprinted in digital format but that’s mostly because of its close association with the Avengers and Iron Man, two of the company’s biggest money makers today. If it hadn’t been for that, I think this series would have been left to languish in the back issue bin with so many other bad comics from the 90s.

Given that Force Works represented nearly everything that almost destroyed Marvel Comics in the 1990s, I will be very surprised if someone decides to revive the series. Which is not to say it is impossible what with Disney strip-mining all of Marvel’s source materials for the next big hit, I think all it takes is just the right pitch and suddenly we’ll be getting more Force Works. That said, I’m not about to hold my breath on it and neither should you.