It Was Worth A Look

Night Force vol. 1
DC Comics
Marv Wolfman, writer
Gene Colan, artist

I've always enjoyed Marv Wolfman's writing to varying degrees. He is a large part of the reason I got back into comics as a teenager through his work on New Teen Titans. A few years later, he was incredible with his epic Crisis On Infinite Earths maxi-series. Even when I didn't just love something he wrote, I still enjoyed aspects of his work. But I never warmed up to this series when it first debuted in 1982. I tried the first issue or two, and at the time, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Fast forward several years and I have read and enjoyed a much larger array of comics and genres. I read and enjoyed Wolfman's and Colan's collaborations on Marvel's Tomb of Dracula, read for the first time in the recent Marvel Essentials collections. Night Force was billed as being by the same creative team and very much in the same creative vein as that series. So I decided to give it another try.

The premise centers around the enigmatic Baron Winters, a character whose exact age and origins are shrouded in mystery. What is known and/or surmised about Winters is that he has been around a long, long time, he rarely ever leaves the mansion in Georgetown (Washington, D.C.) wherein he resides, he assembles various agents to combat various supernatural, occult forces, and he really isn't a very nice man. Winters is always accompanied by and often speaks to a leopard named Merlin. Of his agents, little is known about how Winters knows these people or why. Sometimes they aren't even aware that they are working on his behalf as they go about what they believe are their normal lives. This means that, unlike most serialized fiction, you never know when a character might be killed or disappear never to be seen again, thus upping the suspense of the series.

To be honest, I was a little underwhelmed by the 14 issues that make up the mid-1980s first volume of this title. To be fair, these tales may have been more original when first published, but now there is little here that hasn't been seen before in other venues. The writing is still well done, and Colan's shadowy art style is best suited to horror. And I did become a little more engaged in the stories as the series progressed, but even at the time, the title found a very small, dedicated audience that wasn't large enough to keep Night Force afloat. So after 14 issues and four story arcs of varying lengths, Night Force was canceled. A text piece at the end of the final issue promised the title would return with a series of connected limited series in the next year or so, and while that prediction ultimately proved to be false, the title would return.