Rob welcomes back network all-star Ryan Daly to discuss NIGHT FORCE #4!
Check out images from this comic by clicking here!
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1. Nobody thought young Rob L McCarthy was cool enough for Night force
2 Everybody told older Rob it was just reheated tomb of Dracula
3 ALSO it was hard to find
4 RUSSIAN PSionic powers were a huge deal the FBI FILE on boby Ficher Mentions telepathy (as i recall but check with somebody who’d know better
I haven’t read any of the original Night Force and don’t think it made it to the spinner racks at my local newsstand. I did pick up the 2012 series and enjoyed it. In fact, when I met Marv Wolfman, I had him sign (along w my COIE TPB) an issue of that series and a Green Lantern/Plastic Man one-shot that he wrote at roughly the same time. He seemed genuinely happy that someone had liked those books. He also mentioned that the GL/Plas story was him stretching out (no pun intended) to do some more light-hearted and comedic material.
I can always count on this podcast to stir up a memory or two. Thanks for that.
Great job, All-Stars! I’m behind on my podcast listening and especially my comments. However, I really enjoyed this podcast, despite not enjoying the one or two issues of Night Force I picked up.
I think Ryan mentioned Invasion of the Body Snatchers. My wife, Mrs. Negentropy and I watched the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers with noted film historian Rob Kelly and his wife. We discussed it with them afterward. It was my first viewing of the film, and it was at the Tampa Theatre, where Mr. Kelly will be introducing Carrie on 2 October and Blade on 11 October.
On top of that, I have a relative who works at a food bank; he recently met a woman who claimed to have been involved in the U.S. Intelligence Community’s psionic experiments that ended before she was born. She has also claimed to have been off-planet and admitted to some familiarity with the show Stranger Things. I believe one of those assertions. Anyway, because of that extensive pedigree, I feel qualified to comment on the Cold War and the paranormal in fiction.
I think these kinds of stories resonated with people for a few reasons. First, the Cold War seemed like something out of a comic book or a sci-fi movie. It was (at least on one level) a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Vast national resources were devoted to secret missions and new, hi-tech weapons. Once, one of my daughters asked me a series of questions about the Cold War. “Were we really in a race to the moon against the Soviets?” “Yes.” “Did each side really have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world?” “Yes.” “Did we really fight proxy wars and hunt each other’s spies?” “Yes.” “But the Soviets never really had a program to train little girls into ballerina assassins like in the Marvel movies?” [pause while I search my memory] “…No. Not as far as I know.” So, processing all this through the lens of actual comic books and movies made perfect sense.
I think part of what we were processing was not only the threat, and what they might do to us, but also what we were doing to fight them. By that I mean how much of what we did was justified, and where the line we couldn’t cross and still be good guys was.
Even though Night Force didn’t grab me as a child, it’s clear from this story that it was a work of significant skill and labor by masters at their craft. And it was exploring important themes.
I forgot one point. Ryan was right that it was all creepier because they looked like the majority of Americans ethnically, so they could therefore be infiltrators. It also made them more difficult to dehumanize and “other.” But the fact that the Russians and the East Germans were European was an important difference. They were from older cultures, and in the case of the Russians, a more mystical one that had only a new and tenuous grasp on modernity. Plenty of creep factor and fodder for hoodoo stories there.
Oh, and Rob, in case I get distracted next month, I’ll say it now: Thanks for sharing pieces of your childhood with us. It was a blast.
My only encounter with Night Force was issue 11. I’m not sure how I ended up with it. I think it might have been in one of the comic book 3 packs, as it’s not something my uncles read and it certainly wouldn’t have been something I’d have grabbed off the rack. I was pretty much only interested in superheroes during this book’s run. Once I learned about the books premise and that it had a short run, it became one of the first series I put a complete collection of together.
Night Force is certainly a fascinating book. I often speculated on where the series might have gone if it had been successful.
Thanks for another look back at the weird, wild and wonderful of comics from our younger days.
In August 82, I had the flu or something, so my brother brought me 5 DC comics, the most comics I’d ever gotten at once at that point. So based on that memory, I eventually decided to get all the 8/82 DC’s, which is how I got this, my only Night Force.
And this week I went to a Poconos comic shop for the first time…they have dollar boxes! The awful NJ comic shops I was stuck with haven’t had dollar boxes for 20 years.
Night Force is a series I’d never read, but I still enjoyed the conversation – which, when you noted the theme of psychics and the paranormal intertwined with Cold War politics, reminded me of Steve Englehart’s 1980 prose novel, The Point Man. The theme there is also the occult and psychic abilities, in which the US/Soviet rivalry also plays a part, as main villain of the story is real-life, purported Russian telepath Wolf Messing (the actual guy was dead by the time the novel had been published, but the character in the book is an immortal wizard or some such who faked his death). Interesting that other comic book guys were drawing from the same well.
And yes, I agree that the cover to this issue is quite striking.
Fun episode, Rob and Ryan! Hearing Ryan talk about Night Force, I kept expecting Rob to adopt an Australian accent.
This is such an odd book. The art is moody and atmospheric, but the overall story is hard to follow at times. I agree with Ryan that comics maybe weren’t the medium for this.
Having said that, Baron Winters did always intrigue me. I especially like when he was with the magicians during Crisis. He was a sort of agoraphobic Dr. Strange.
Can’t believe the show is ending. Happy to have been listening since episode one, but sad to see it go.
I have talked about this series with Ryan and with Billy D on his horror show! Missed the trifecta!
I bought the first arc of this off the rack. But this was definitely a ‘hide from Mom’ comic, like Conan. Between the ‘let’s harness satan as a power source’ orgies and the premarital, alcohol fueled sex, the dismembering of the main characters, and the rather … ahem .. sensual language Marv used to describe mental incursions, this was one Mom would have said was taboo.
Glad to see it revisited!
Fun episode guys, but if Ryan makes write synopses that long for Knightcast 2.0…well, we may have to un-revive it!
I think I said this when Ryan and Hix were covering Night Force, but at the time, all plain-clothes people turned me off. And honestly so did the art of Gene Colan. I accepted him on Batman, because, it was Batman, and even as a snot-nosed brat, I could see his art fit the character. Thankfully I have better taste now.
I am going to really miss this show, and both versions of the jingle. But I know there are only so many vacations, and so many comics.
Oh, and “Wuss”? “Wuss”? I will have you know I prefer the term “weiner” to describe my younger, fraidy cat-self.
With “Mountain Comics” coming to an end soon, I thought I’d share a bit of nostalgia of my own and remember some of the comics I got during my own childhood family vacations…in my case, “Beach Comics.” Here goes:
Uncanny X-Men #107 (1977, age 7): This wasn’t my first X-Men (I inherited a large collection from a family friend when I was 6, so I had a lot of comics older than me, and I read them voraciously), but it was the first one I picked out from the rack myself. This was the issue that introduced the Imperial Guard, and I was amazed by all these colorful characters…I hadn’t read any Legion of Super-Heroes stories yet, so I didn’t know that these were take-offs of existing characters.
Ms. Marvel #12 (also 1977, age 7). I had no idea who any of these characters were (the story featured the Elementals, who had previously appeared in the Living Mummy stories) or what was going on, but I was fascinated. The panel of Hydron dehydrating Zephyr was pure nightmare fuel. Also, my young eyes were scandalized by the cover blurb: “Call her Hecate…call her Hellion!” At that age, I couldn’t believe they could “get away” with putting the word “Hell” (or a variation) on a comic cover.
Then there’s a pretty big gap in my “Beach Comics” memory, as I can’t recall with much certainty which books I got on vacation and which ones I bought at home, except that I’m pretty sure I only bought Charlton comics at the beach…
Scary Tales #36 (cover-dated 1983, but bought in September 1982, age 12). This issue had some good horror stories with art by Pat Boyette and Tom Sutton, but the most memorable element was the cover by a young Mitch O’Connell (who hadn’t yet developed his trademark retro style), showing a green monster crashing through a window and startling a negligee-clad blonde…yeah, this was one of the comics that triggered my puberty.
Beyond the Grave #17 (1984, age 14): Another Charlton anthology (all reprints from the 1970s), this one stuck in my memory due to the story “No Way Out” by Nicola Cuti and Joe Staton, about an agoraphobic writer (modeled on H.P. Lovecraft, though I didn’t know that at the time) who’s so traumatized that he literally can’t see the doors of his mansion; he thinks that other people (like the delivery boy who brings his groceries) can walk through walls. The sad twist ending comes when he finally breaks through his mental block and sees the doors again; now he can leave through any door he wants, but he can’t decide which one. (I later found a copy of the original Ghostly Haunts issue this story was reprinted from, and I got that issue signed by Joe Staton when I saw him at a convention…that’s how much I enjoyed this story.)
Swamp Thing #41 (1984, age 14): My introduction to Alan Moore. I’d read the original Swamp Thing series (as part of that inherited collection), so I was familiar with the character, but this was unlike any Swamp Thing story I’d seen before.
Charlton Action #11 (1985, age 15): A Steve Ditko anthology, featuring one of Ditko’s better latter-day creations, Static. I found the whole book highly entertaining, although the part that stood out to me was the bizarre coloring decision to give the villain blond hair but a red mustache…ah, that Charlton quality!
Thanks for letting me take this long trip down memory lane!
Ryan: “I covered the entire series with my best friend Paul Hicks”
Rob:
Rob, I’ll be holding onto that for the rest of my life.
Great episode as would be expected from the 2 of you. I’ve never read Night Force – surprisingly since I am a fan of both Wolfman and Colan. And since I hadn’t, I shamefully never listened to Ryan’s coverage of it back in the day.
But as I was driving today I got to hear Ryan’s epic summary of the issue, it reminded me (in length if not in style) of Shawn’s Batman Family Reunion summaries!
Despite that, you have now made me put Night Force on my DCU reading pile. There is a collection of all the issues digitized. As if my pile wasn’t big enough.
But seriously I am going to miss this show when it is gone.
I read every issue of this series from the beginning, and loved it to bits. Having been too young to collect Tomb of Dracula when it was coming out – I was restricted to seeing it in black and white in Marvel UK’s Dracula Lives weekly – I was thrilled to be able to latch onto a new series by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan. Great discussion!
We can, in fact, connect the original Night Force run to the DC universe via the use of Science City, which in Wolfman’s New Titans was the base for Russian hero Red Star.
And to come full circle, in a few days’ time the first volume of the new Tomb of Dracula Omnibus Volume One will arrive!
Great show, Rob and Ryan. Never read Night Force, but you’re right that it probably would’ve made a good 10pm network series. In case I don’t get it in next episode, I wanted to say how much I’ve always enjoyed Mountain Comics. Such a great idea for a show. That Mount Airy Lodge jingle will never leave my brain. It was always a fun look back at a certain time period in comics – and I was proud to be a guest once, myself! I think this was the second show I binged on the network after TreasuryCast. Be proud of what you’ve done here, Rob. It will be missed.