Psi-Force

Danny Fingeroth, Fabian Nicieza, Mark Texeira & others
Psi-Force (1989)
I'm gearing up for a mammoth read of every single mutant book published by Marvel up until about 1991 - the point at which it all went tits up so far as I'm concerned - which I plan to write about as I go, an enterprise which will probably take up at least a year. My currently reading this, the complete run of a single comic book, should therefore be considered training, although it also constitutes homework to some extent. I retain a vague impression of Fabian Nicieza having been in some way culpable to it all going tits up, and yet I remember enjoying his run on Psi-Force; so I'm taking stock of my own powers of recall, amongst other things, one of those other things being that I needed light relief from Genet.

Anyway, as you may recall, New Universe was one of Marvel's earlier concessions to pow! the comic book growing up, adding a new layer of realism to its standard fare in the same way that the Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four once added a new layer of realism to the primary colours of their predecessors back in the sixties. So the New Universe was our world to which the Bullpen introduced superheroes - or at least persons with unusual powers - and let things happen as they might have happened in what we recognise as real life, give or take some small change. It may be a waste of time looking for industry parallels, but Star Brand was probably the New Universe version of Superman with Spitfire as Iron Man, DP7 as the X-Men, and so on. Psi-Force were possibly also the X-Men, or maybe a hybrid of the X-Men and Voltron, the giant robot formed from a group of smaller robots. Anyway, there were five of Psi-Force, each with psychic abilities which our New Universe seems to have assumed were possibly real even before the white event gave everyone powers; and under certain conditions the five combine to create a giant winged composite being called the Psi-Hawk.

Fantastic though this may seem, Psi-Force managed to go a full year without trying to dress anybody in spandex or having them answer to a superhero name. Our five psychics are teenage runaways whose powers have left them no option but to hit the road, and so they've all ended up in San Francisco at a home for missing kids, which perhaps provides early clues as to why the New Universe went tits up at the end of its third year. The comic had grown up in so much as that we had unlikely powers without anyone deciding to be Batman, but it was otherwise business as usual in terms of modular teenage angst communicated through thought bubbles and excessively wordy captions describing what you can see on the page and have presumably already worked out for yourself; and our five Psi-Force kids comprise the angry loner, the inevitable athletic black guy, the shy but well meaning foreigner who doesn't always understand what's going on, the snooty Asian girl who is obsessed with clothes, and the much younger awkward four-eyed brainiac. Take away their powers and it's The Breakfast Club. They don't actually drive around San Francisco solving crimes with the help of a sandwich eating dog, but it wouldn't seem out of character if they did.

Yet Psi-Force isn't entirely without redeeming qualities. The story is well told and inventive within certain limits, if a little more wordy than it needed to be during its first year; and Mark Texeira's art is fucking gorgeous - enough so as to negate the occasional hint of the kind of cheese inevitably generated when secretive government agencies are on the hunt for moody teenagers with unusual powers.

Fabian Nicieza stirred things up when I guess sales figures made it apparent that the New Universe was proceeding with maybe a little too much caution, and that it might be possible to ramp things up without giving everyone a cape. As a writer, he's since become something of a big deal, not least as the creator of Deadpool, but I found him uneven - at least his early writing. Whatever was happening always seemed to be the work of some secretive government agency, the kind which gets about in black helicopters. It conspicuously felt as though notes had been taken from reading comics by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, notably the stuff about screwing up the lives of your characters. In fact, it conspicuously felt as though Nicieza's influences were limited to other comic books and maybe a couple of action movies. It felt like fanzine level writing with influences as placeholders for inspiration.

Yet, even in his first published work on Psi-Force, there's something sparky trying to break free from the confusion of Nicieza learning on the job. The ideas are weirdly engaging, even when it's obvious where he got them and what he did to twist them into something less transparently derivative; and so we end up with Psi-Force kidnapped and held prisoner at the Siberian Project, a secretive Soviet government agency which strives to turn mutants paranormals into an elite fighting force, and it almost works.

The problem here, at least by the end of the run, is that hardly anyone was reading so I guess the company was reluctant to spend money on any of the New Universe books, and the art is fucking terrible, possibly the worst I've seen in something which wasn't actually drawn in biro then photocopied; and passing references to conflict in Afghanistan aren't quite enough to make it seem all grown up and plausible.

Chains generally being as strong as their weakest links, the best one can say of Fabian Nicieza's run on Psi-Force was that he almost got away with it despite almost everyone else letting the side down; and the best one can say of Psi-Force as a whole was that Mark Texeira's art was wonderful and that it tried its best, and at least succeeded in communicating its own potential even if the stuff dripping out of the spigot at the other end wasn't always great. Having said that, I nevertheless thought it was amazing at the time, and sometimes that's all you need. Not everything has to be King Lear.