Admit it - if someone at Marvel hadn’t come up with something like that, you just know Disney would have gotten around to it sooner or later (come to think of it, I’m surprised Disney hasn’t already greenlit a Power Pack sitcom for the Disney Channel, if only to make us forget that awful Zoom movie they made a few years back).ĥ.
Their ship crash-lands right in front of the scientist’s Long Island beach house without anyone noticing but his children, and before you know it, the kids are powered up and involved in intergalactic intrigue while trying to save their parents. Power has “discovered the annihilation effect,” and they must stop him before he sets off a chain reaction that destroys Earth. While laser fire “SKRA-KKOW”s across their hull, two unseen aliens talk about the reason they’re coming to Earth: a scientist and family man by the name of Dr. The first issue of Power Pack opens with an alien ship high above Earth’s atmosphere trying to outrun its pursuers. The title’s set-up was right out of a Disney live-action movie. She was also adept at both action sequences and quieter moments, and there’s little doubt her pencils were a large part of the reason why the book was a popular seller among girls and grown-up comic fans hoping to induct their own young readers into the club.Ĥ. Looking back, one of the nice things about those early Power Pack issues is how Brigman succeeded in making the children look like actual children, and not shrunken adults. Simonson was writing up her ideas for the book when she ran into Brigman and asked if she could draw kids as it turned out, Brigman’s summer job sketching children at amusement parks made her a natural choice for her first-ever comic assignment. I’m happy to stand corrected on this, but to the best of my knowledge Power Pack was the first-ever Marvel title to debut with both a female writer (Simonson) and a female artist (June Brigman) at the helm. It was a big leap forward for female comic creators (and realistic body proportions). Never quite ascending to the top tier of Marvel’s titles sales-wise, the book managed a respectable run of 62 issues, not counting a handful of mini-series over the years, and the team has retained a cult following to this day.ģ. But Marvel took a chance and somehow it worked. The idea that Marvel’s typical customer would buy a book starring children who were as likely to use their powers to retrieve a lost baby tooth as they were to save the planet from aliens… well, “optimistic” doesn’t begin to cover it. The ’80s was a gung-ho decade were action-movie heroes ruled the land and enough was never enough Marvel clearly saw its future built on teens and testosterone, and it started promoting violent anti-hero types like Wolverine and the Punisher to pump up sales. Understand this: then as now, most comic readers (in North America, at any rate) were teenage boys and men in their early 20s, and the comic publishers knew who buttered their bread. It defied the conventional wisdom that said comic readers wouldn’t accept stories about “babies in Spandex.” To be sure, there were a few concessions made - an abundance of special guest stars in later issues come to mind - but to this day it’s hard to think of another Marvel comic set in the “official” Marvel universe that was so distinctly unique.Ģ. But sell it she did, and Shooter gave it the green light with the first issue cover-dated August 1984. “He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.” While the self-styled House of Ideas had always prided itself (in those days at least) on its ability to make stars out of the most unlikely characters - this was a company that had only just recently put out a book about a bionic truck driver - it’s easy to see how a book chronicling the perils of a pack of prepubescent powerhouses would have been a tough project for Simonson, a longtime editor but rookie writer, to sell. “I got bored,” she said, and started hashing out an idea for a team of superheroes who were also siblings, with the oldest being 12 years old and the youngest in kindergarten.
The way creator and then-Marvel editor Louise Simonson remembers it, editor-in-chief Jim Shooter had just hired a batch of new editors, cutting everybody’s workload in half.
The book came out in a simpler time when comic creators were encouraged to be, you know, creative. 10 Reasons Why Power Pack Was Either the Most Brilliantly Awesome or the Downright Most Insane Comic Ever Conceivedġ.
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