Highway 62

But I’m not here today to talk about Marvel (though I promise to finish off that list sometime). Instead, I’m going to share with you, gentle reader, some of the wonders that I’ve come across in my local funnybook shop’s dollar bins (which are both mighty and awe-inspiring). Buried in a semi-climate controlled bunker (hot in summer and cold in winter) somewhere in San Diego are real gems of comic history, often shedding light on hidden aspects of (mainstream) comics.

For instance, this week’s entry. Let’s talk about it for a moment.

Firstly, no superheroes. Nope, not a cape in sight. No tights, no sidekicks, no nothing of the sort. Just a bunch of humans running around getting in trouble. True, some of them might have been a little more than human and one of ‘em had something resembling ‘superpowers’ but they sure weren’t any powers that you’d want any part of. One of the lead characters was a near-alcoholic misanthrope reporter who’d gone from Pulitzers to tabloids and alimony, living out of cheap hotels. Another of ‘em was a psychic researcher who’s experiments had gone awry, killing his wife (or worse). These weren’t side characters. These were the people that the book was about, and they weren’t always nice or likeable.

Secondly, no single-issue stories. Yup, every storyline ran over multiple issues. No ‘complete novel in 24 pages’ here. The first arc ran something like seven issues and really had room to breathe and let the characters flesh themselves out. Motivations, at first hidden, were given a chance to reveal themselves without the rushed theatrics of more regular comics fare.

Thirdly, it was a horror book. And not just demons from hell horror, though there was certainly an element of that. But a lot of it had to do with the terrible decisions that the characters were put to. Not just blood and gore and guts (and, really very little of that, other than the suggested), but real and gripping psychological drama. This goes back to the other two points above, in that they were basically “real” characters given room to breathe in expanded stories. This gave a chance for the gravity of their situations really come to the fore. No matter where the setting or who the shadowy adversary was, the characters drove the story.

Fourthly, it didn’t look like a typical comic book, though it came out of one of the big companies at the time. No nine-panel grids here. These were expanded pages, where the action couldn’t be held down to neatly-ruled panels and the like. Often the page was one huge panel with a series of insets or a loose conglomeration of panels barely lashed-down to the page. And the artwork amplified this at every opportunity. Huge areas of shadow and black ink covered every page, characters lit dramatically at any and every opportunity. The pencils and inks were loose enough to convey energy and action, but never appearing sloppy or amateurish.

Curious? Does this sound like a comic that any of us would be reading today? From any number of publishers? Anyone from DC to Oni to IDW could have put this out, right? Well, DC put this book out in 1982.

Night Force was comic that came out in the very early part of the 1980s, a time where most DC product wasn’t really felt to be at the peak of its form. True, great things were just over the horizon in the form of comics like Swamp Thing, Ronin, and a host of others that followed. But at this time, things felt kinda stagnant, a little dull. Lots of superheroes, the tail end of the horror anthology’s lifetime in the mainstream, very few other genre books to talk about really. But still, thirteen years before Vertigo, and years before Alan Moore rewrote the rules of horror comics, Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan came together and created Night Force.

In many ways, Night Force would lay down the template for the modern comic book, primarily for the reasons that I outlined above. They were thinking right out of the box. Remember, this was a time of self-contained stories, with occasional storylines spanning over the length of several books, but a lot of those books were functioning on the soap-opera model of just adding story threads whenever one appeared to tie itself off. Night Force made an active effort to tell much bigger, much more fully-realized stories as self-contained pieces, not as a larger companywide tapestry. I’d even go so far to say that the stories read much better in rapid succession, rather in monthly serial form (and this was back in a time when collected editions just did not happen, remember.)

Unfortunately, as with many ideas that are ahead of their time, Night Force was cancelled after a short run. There are only fourteen issues in the original run of Night Force, which is pretty small as these things go. Just over a year of issues, sadly. Though in comparison to today’s market, maybe that’s not so bad, really. I mean, how many reboots and limited series do we see these days?

That aside, it’s remarkable to see a lot of the limitations of the monthly comic being addressed this long ago, both in terms of story presentation and content. Though Night Force didn’t benefit from an age of Mature Readers warnings and the ability to depict all kinds of violence and language and adult situations (not just sex, kids!), it still cut a trail-head into a predominantly-unexplored chunk of the wilderness. Yeah, EC comics might have been far more extreme in their imagery, they weren’t there in terms of trying to tell an actual novel-length story. And without comics like Night Force making the attempt, who knows, we might not have had the ground broken for all those who followed.

All this for just a dollar an issue (less, if you can get ‘em for cover.)