Jack Morelli – In My Not So Humble Opinion

It Came from the 1990s: The Warlock Chronicles #1

In the early 1970s Jim Starlin made a significant impact at Marvel Comics, creating the arch-villain Thanos the Mad Titan and revitalizing the moribund Captain Marvel series. Starlin later had a falling-out with Marvel, and for several years in the 1980s he went over to DC Comics. Eventually, though, Starlin returned to Marvel at the end of the decade, where he became writer of the Silver Surfer series. In his first issue, #34 (cover-dated Feb 1990), Starlin revived Thanos.

Starlin spent the next year and a half building up to a major storyline wherein Thanos acquired the six Infinity Gems, obtaining godlike power, with the goal of wiping out half of the living beings in the universe. Apparently this storyline was originally going to take place primarily within the pages of Silver Surfer, but at some point the decision was made to spin it out into the massive six issue Infinity Gauntlet miniseries, which crossed over with a number of other titles. And when Infinity Gauntlet concluded, it led into the ongoing series Warlock and the Infinity Watch, as well as two further crossovers, Infinity War and Infinity Crusade.

And then, in the Spring of 1993, yet another book was spun off from all of Starlin’s various Infinity going-ons. The Warlock Chronicles #1, cover-dated July 1993, was written by Starlin, penciled by Tom Raney, inked by Keith Williams, lettered by Jack Morelli, and colored by Gina Going. (I recently got my copy autographed by Starlin, Raney and Williams.)

The Warlock Chronicles ended up lasting only eight issues. The series was clearly part of Marvel’s early 1990s efforts to flood the market. I don’t know if Marvel actually believed it was viable for there to be two ongoing series featuring Adam Warlock, or if they were just tossing stuff at the wall to see what would stick. Whatever the case, less than a year later the industry began its catastrophic crash. I seem to recall Marvel retroactively claiming that The Warlock Chronicles was intended to be a miniseries all along.

Whatever the case, this series offers a good demonstration of the state of mainstream comic books in the early 1990s: dump a bunch of product to push the competition off the comic shop shelves, have it tie in with a huge crossover, in this case Infinity Crusade, and slap an attention-grabbing gimmick cover on the first issue. I believe this one is known as a “holofoil” cover.

Keeping all this in mind, “Things Past” is a surprisingly good story. Following on from the early chapters of Infinity Crusade, Adam Warlock has been rendered comatose and is drifting “far from home, in a dimensional reality unknown to him.” Adam is discovered by the sorcerer Darklore and his fairy-like disciple Meer’lyn. Darklore is able to communicate with the Infinity Gem on Adam’s forehead, and the sentient jewel begins recounting the history of its golden-skinned host.

Looking at the recap of Adam Warlock’s convoluted history in The Warlock Chronicles #1, I am reminded that sometimes assigning accurate credit for the creation of comic book characters is anything but simple.

If we want to get technical about it, Adam Warlock was created by Jack Kirby… but not really. That is to say, that without Kirby there would be no Adam Warlock, yet the character he ultimately became is very far removed from Kirby’s original conception.

In 1967 Kirby was still the plotter & penciler on Fantastic Four. In issues #66-67, Kirby introduced a group of scientists called the Enclave who sought to create an artificial, perfect human being who was initially known as “Him.” Kirby intended this story as a critique of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, which Kirby’s fellow writer / artist Steve Ditko had embraced & incorporated in his own work. “Him” would have turned on his well-intentioned creators, destroying them because they failed to meet his own standards of perfection. However, when Stan Lee provided the script to those Fantastic Four issues, he reduced the story to a much simpler tale of good vs evil, with the Enclave intending to use Him to conquer the world, only for the artificial being to reject their plans, banishing them.

This was one of the incidents that fueled Kirby’s growing disenchantment with Lee, ultimately culminating in Kirby departing from Marvel in 1970, and his decision to script all his stories from that point on so that he would no longer have to worry about his plots & characters being altered by others. Kirby used Him only one more time before his departure from Marvel, in Thor #165-166. In certain respects, it is one of those stories where it feels like Kirby was phoning it in as he awaited an opportunity to jump ship from Marvel. One can hardly blame him for feeling that way.

There’s no way of knowing what might have happened next with Him after this, except in early 1972 in the pages of Marvel Premiere #1 writer Roy Thomas, paired with penciler Gil Kane, brought Him back. Thomas & Kane revamped Him into Adam Warlock, a cosmic messiah figure, a direction influenced by Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice’s popular rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which had premiered several months earlier. Dispatched by the High Evolutionary to the parallel world “Counter Earth” on the opposite side of the Sun, Adam Warlock, now gifted with what came to be known as the Soul Gem, was pitted against the Man-Beast, an evil being of temptation & corruption.

After appearing in the first two issues of Marvel Premiere, Adam Warlock graduated to his own ongoing series. Ultimately, however, Warlock only lasted for eight issues before being abruptly canceled in 1973.

Two years later, though, Starlin got his hands on Adam Warlock. Starlin was highly skeptical of organized religion, and so he took “Warlock as cosmic messiah” to what was, to him, a logical conclusion. Adam encountered The Universal Church of Truth, a galaxy-spanning religious empire ruled by his own evil future self, the tyrannical Magus. Starlin also quickly incorporated Thanos into the Warlock storyline, soon positioning the Mad Titan to be Adam’s arch enemy.

So, when Starlin returned to Marvel in the early 1990s and resurrected Thanos, it was all but inevitable that he would also bring back Adam Warlock. And even though this new Thanos epic had begun in the pages of Silver Surfer, once Warlock returned he quickly became the main protagonist in Starlin’s corner of the Marvel universe. (Honestly, I feel Starlin made Warlock, like Thanos, too important, to the point that at times he wrote everyone else as incompetent, just so Warlock and Thanos would always be the two smartest people in the room.)

Back in 1993 Marvel still had yet to institute a comprehensive reprint program to collect their earlier stories in trade paperbacks. There was also no Wikipedia or Google or whatever, so it’s not like I could have looked up any of this online. This no doubt made Starlin’s recap of Adam’s history in The Warlock Chronicles #1 very informative for new readers at the time.

That said, there weren’t any footnotes in this issue, so you would have no idea where of these events originally took place. As it is, for quite some time I actually thought Adam Warlock had been created by Starlin, and it wasn’t until at least a decade later that I learned about the character’s convoluted conception & development.

Amusingly, I met Gil Kane when he was a guest at a comic con in 1999. He had a small pile of original artwork with him for sale, including a few Warlock pages. My immediate reaction was “When did Gil Kane draw Warlock?” I thank God that I did not vocalize this thought, instead keeping it to myself. Kane was known not to suffer fools gladly, so I can only imagine what sort of rebuke this might have earned! A few years later I finally learned about the character’s publication history, at which point I gave myself a mental facepalm.

Cutting to the chase, all of this is why I find the first issue of The Warlock Chronicles to be simultaneously pointless and very effectively done. It’s basically an illustrated Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry, but it came out at a time when readers such as myself who weren’t even born when most of the original Warlock stories were published would have found it a very useful source of information.

Occasionally I’ll pick up a new comic book from Marvel or DC, and my reaction to it ends up being “Who the fuck are these characters supposed to be?” Seriously, half the time I have no idea who they are. I understand that both publishers have embraced the “writing for the trade paperback” model, but it would not interrupt the flow of a collected story too badly to occasionally include these sorts of recaps, especially if you have a character with a very convoluted backstory.

Tom Raney does a great job illustrating Warlock’s history in this issue, with accompanying cameos by a wide-ranging cast of characters. Raney is one of those pencilers who I’ve always felt should have been much bigger. He has a very dynamic, flashy, detailed style, but unlike some of the other artists who broke into the comic book biz in the early 1990s he also has a good grasp of storytelling & anatomy. Raney is still in comic books, having recently drawn Green Lantern DC. I’m glad that he’s still working, unlike too many of his contemporaries who unfortunately have been forgotten by the Big Two. (I suppose this post is as good an excuse as any to showcase his work.)

Keith Williams does a good job inking Raney’s pencils here. I’ve always found Williams to be a versatile inker, doing fine work over a variety of different pencilers.

The lush, vibrant coloring is by Gina Going, who is married to Tom Raney. I feel Going brought out the best in his work, because obviously she would have understood exactly what he was going for with his pencils. She did a good job coloring all of the weird, dynamic cosmic events recounted in this story. Going subsequently colored Raney on Mutant X, Stormwatch and Outsiders.

I do find it a bit difficult to believe that The Warlock Chronicles #1 came out 30 years ago, now making it older than all of the stories it was recapping. (Fantastic Four #66-67, the debut of Him, would only have been 26 years old in 1993).

The Warlock Chronicles remains an interesting glimpse back at a time when Marvel attempted to inundate the market with dozens upon dozens of titles & gimmick covers… as opposed to the present day, when they are inundating the market with hundreds of variant covers. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, and all that.

It Came From the 1990s: Force Works #1-3

Welcome to another edition of Super Blog Team-Up! This time I and my fellow SBTU participants will be looking at comic book “gimmick covers” from the 1990s.

The first gimmick cover was the silver foil cover featured on Silver Surfer #50, released by Marvel Comics with a June 1991 cover date. It instantly sold out (14 year old me drove my parents nuts trying to find a copy) and was very quickly followed just a month later by Ghost Rider #15 with its glow-in-the-dark cover. That issue also sold like hotcakes, and the age of the gimmick cover was upon us. In the longstanding spirit of American capitalism jumping on a trend and riding it right into the ground, comic book publishers were very soon churning out gimmick covers at an insane rate, until we were all very sick of them.

That brings us to the comic I’m spotlighting: Force Works, which debuted in mid-1994. The first three issues were written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, penciled by Tom Tenney, inked by Rey Garcia, lettered by Jack Morelli, and colored by Joe Rosas.

I really think this was moment when gimmick covers demonstrably jumped the shark, when the gimmick became so utterly ridiculous & impractical that you were just left shaking you head in bemusement.

What was the particular gimmick cover that Force Works #1 featured? Why, it was none other than a pop-up cover! That’s right, when you pulled the flap on the front cover up and back, it unfolded into a three dimensional display of the Force Works team fighting an army of alien Kree soldiers.

Here are some photos I took of my own copy, which demonstrates the cover in action…

The major problem with the Force Works pop-up cover was that it could be really difficult to get the darn thing to fold back closed. When you lowered the flap back down, that central pop-up of Wonder Man, fist raised in the air, struggling against the Kree, had a tendency to get tangled up in the other pop-up pieces, resulting in the thing being stuck halfway open as seen in the photo below. Any efforts to straighten it out would have to be done very carefully, otherwise the whole thing might just get torn in half.

FW1coverD — HELP!!! HOW DO YOU GET THIS DAMN THING CLOSED?!?

So, ludicrous cover gimmick aside, what the heck was Force Works about anyway? Spun out from the recently-cancelled Avengers West Coast series, Force Works was an effort by Marvel Comics to replicate the edgy popularity of the bestselling X-Men spin-off X-Force devised by Rob Liefeld in 1991 and apply it to some of the Avengers characters. It’s fairly obvious that Force Works was also an attempt to capture the tone (and readers) of the various other red-hot paramilitary superhero series that Liefeld and the other Image Comics founders subsequently created in the early 1990s such as Youngblood and Brigade.

This scene from the first issue of Force Works sums up the series’ mission statement, with Iron Man pitching the concept to his fellow ex-Avengers:

“The universe has become profoundly more dangerous since the Avengers were first assembled. These days the Earth plays a far more active role in matters of galactic importance.

“The stakes are far higher, far more often.

“I believe that it is the duty of Earth’s Mightiest to use their powers proactively, to protect this planet’s interests… and, if necessary, pursue an aggressive policy of defense and security.”

Ah, yes, the “proactive” super hero team… It’s an idea that sounds good in concept, but seldom works well in execution, at least not at either Marvel or DC Comics, with their shared universes and their ongoing serialized narratives that rely on the illusion of change to maintain a basic status quo.

For example, you cannot have the Avengers becoming proactive, invading Latveria, overthrowing Doctor Doom, and locking him up in a maximum security cell for life, because he’s just too darn popular a villain, and in six months another writer or editor is going to want to use him in their book.

Additionally, the more “proactive” or “aggressive” superheroes become, the closer they end up veering into fascist territory. I’ve touched upon this before, but this is an unfortunate result of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen being hugely successful, and comic books publisher then trying to apply the whole “grim & gritty” ethos to mainstream superheroes throughout the 1990s. Yeah, Rorschach was a proactive, take-no-prisoners vigilante, but if you actually read the damn book it’s clear that Moore & Gibbons were showing us that he’s also a horrifying, insane monster. But too many readers missed (or flat-out ignored) the subtext and just thought Rorschach was cool. The publishers noticed that reaction and quickly jumped on that train. Remember what I said before about taking a popular trend and running it completely into the ground?

Whatever the case, even though Iron Man intends for Force Works to be a “proactive, aggressive” team, it speaks volumes that their very first adventure is totally reactive, with first the Kree, and then the insect-like Scatter, attacking the Earth, instantly forcing the heroes into a defensive position.

Another reason why Force Works #1 was derided by many readers, besides that gimmick cover, was that it pointlessly killed off longtime Avengers member Wonder Man. And this was just a few months after Mockingbird, another well-liked Avenger, had been pointlessly killed off in West Coast Avengers #100, once again for no other reason than to have a shocking, dramatic event. Those two deaths back-to-back really felt like a slap in the face to Avengers fans.

Wonder Man and Mockingbird did both eventually return from the dead. So, yeah, by the 1990s we were already at the point where death in superhero comics had become a predictable revolving door, and no one honestly expected anybody to stay deceased permanently.

The first issue of Force Works also introduced the brand new character of Century. In a lot of respects Century just totally screams Nineties. He has a cool-sounding name that doesn’t actually tell you anything about who he is or what he does, he has a ridiculously over-detailed costume design, he uses a freaking axe called Parallax that allows him to teleport by cutting through the fabric of space, and he has an ultra-mysterious past that even he isn’t sure about because he’s suffering from amnesia. Oh, yes, he also had an odd speech pattern. Century is a walking, talking thesaurus, as seen in these various examples from just the first three issues…

Honestly, Century should be incredibly annoying, because on the surface he seems to epitomize everything that was awful about comic book characters introduced in the 1990s. But the thing is, I think he’s actually really cool and interesting, both visually and character-wise. It’s probably because DnA don’t write Century as some sort of kewl badass, but rather as a stranger in a strange land, a lost alien who exudes a genuine vulnerability.

It also helps considerably that DnA had apparently decided right from the get-go exactly what Century’s past was supposed to be, and they wrapped up the mystery of his origins only a year and a half later, rather than frustrating readers by leaving it as a long-dangling subplot.

Looking over the run of Force Works again last week, with the storylines involving Century, the Kree, the Scatter and other characters, I can actually perceive hints of the sort of really good “cosmic” and space opera storytelling that DnA would be doing only a dozen years later with the epic Annihilation event and the super-successful revival of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

It’s definitely worth noting that unlike a lot of up-and-coming young artists who were thrown onto comic books in the early 1990s with a remit to capture the tone of the Image Comics founders, Tom Tenney does a credible job penciling these issues. His work here is solid, showing quite a bit of potential.

Tenney’s career in comics was relatively brief. Subsequently he worked for a number of years in the music industry, which was another of his passions. In the last few years he’s returned to comics, once again creating interesting work, which can be seen on Facebook. He’s listed as contributing a variant cover to the second issue of the upcoming Force Works 2020 miniseries. That’s right, Marvel is bringing Force Works back.

Another point in favor of Force Works is inker Rey Garcia. I really enjoyed the work done on the series by the Filipino-born artist. Like many of his fellow countrymen who previously worked in comic books, Garcia had a very lush, illustrative style.

When considering Garcia’s work on Force Works, it must be pointed out that the series had an insanely high turnover rate for pencilers. Tom Tenney regrettably only drew the first four issues, and after that it was a revolving door. During Force Works’ 22 issue run there were literally a dozen pencilers who worked on it… at least, I think the total was 12, but I might have missed one or two. Whatever the case, Garcia inked nearly every issue of Force Works, which helped keep the look of the series somewhat consistent through all of those changes.

So there you have it, Force Works #1, one of the more ridiculous mainstream comic books to come out during the 1990s. Nevertheless, when all is said & done, I remain fond of some aspects of the series. All these years later I still like the character Century. Also, I appreciate how Abnett & Lanning worked to make the Scarlet Witch into a stronger, more assertive character by having her lead the team, and show her standing up to Tony Stark who, let’s face it, can definitely be a control freak. I still regard both Tom Tenney and Rey Garcia as talented, underrated artists. I also think this series was a bit of a harbinger to DnA’s later, better work.

Still, though, I certainly don’t lament the lack of subsequent fold-out comic book covers. That was just too much!