Brand Echh: KICKERS INC. #1

On the surface of things, KICKERS INC should have been one of the more stable and solidly-crafted of the titles launching as part of Marvel’s 1986 anniversary initiative, the New Universe. It had a creative team with an established track record on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, writer Tom DeFalco and artists Ron Frenz and Sal Buscema. But it wound up being a creative misfire almost right from the start, and it caterwauled to a final issue in about a year, with some of the most extreme creative turnover that one of these series saw. The first clue that something is about to go wrong is perhaps the fact that this initial cover wasn’t the work of Frenz or Buscema. This book was notorious for being mocked in fan circles at the time for being so aggressively goofball.

Tom DeFalco was at this time Marvel’s Executive Editor, the firm’s editorial second-in-command after EIC Jim Shooter. DeFalco had been tasked with coming up with properties for the New Universe initiative, but much of what he brainstormed and developed didn’t fit the evolving mandate of Shooter for the new line. In the case of KICKERS INC, it had begun life as a pitch entitled MR. MAGNIFICENT AND THE TEAM SUPREME. It was meant to be a high-octane adventure series with a team of footballers becoming a freelance action squad in the off-season. Stylistically, it was intended to be a mix of Challengers of the Unknown, the A-Team, and the Howling Commandos. However, this wasn’t what Shooter was looking for. He envisioned a much more grounded take on super heroes and super-powers set against the backdrop of a recognizably real world–the world outside your window. A place that wasn’t supposed to have the sorts of hidden civilizations and strange mystic artifacts and alien visitors that such a team might likely face. And yet, there was something about this idea that he liked. DeFalco and Frenz tried to pull it back, but Jim said he wanted a sports series for the New Universe line, so they were prevailed upon to go forward with it. That decision wound up producing a series that pretty much nobody who was involved with it liked in the end.

The lead character in KICKERS INC is Jack Magniconte, nicknamed Mr. Magnificent for his prowess on the football field as the quarterback for the New York Smashers. His brother Steve is a fitness and nutrition specialist who has been working on a method to increase muscle mass in the same manner as an injection of steroid, but without the damaging side-effects. Jack is looking for a way to keep his edge as he gets older, and so he agrees to be a guinea pig for his brother’s experiment. And the test succeeds beyond anyone’s dreams, mainly because it takes place just as the mysterious White Event that unlocks super-powers takes place across the world. Magniconte finds himself gifted with strength and stamina beyond what should be possible for just a regular athlete.

In fact, it makes him so powerful that on the field he begins to accidentally injure other players, including men on his own team. What’s more, Steve had borrowed the money needed to create his device from a loan shark, Mr. Sloan, who hopes to use his leverage over Jack’s brother to cause him to keep the point spread of upcoming games to a predetermined minimum, which Sloan will bet heavily on. The Smashers play a phenomenal season and are headed to the Super Bowl, But the thrill of the game is now lost on Jack. He’s simply too good, and the challenge of outperforming other players on the field no longer feels like legitimate competition to him. He has everything that he thought he wanted, but he’s not happy.

Somebody else who isn’t happy is Mr Sloan. In the Super Bowl, the Smashers crush the opposition, scoring almost at will thanks to Jack’s enhanced prowess. having lost a bundle, Sloan and his men show up at Steve’s offices for payback. Jack arrives in time to whip the holy hell out of all of the Captain America-style, but Steve gets accidentally gunned down by one of the bad guys, and he perishes. In the aftermath, Jack realizes that he needs to use his newfound power for something worthwhile, and he organizes several members of the Smashers into a freelance mercenary unit that will strive to help people with unusual problems. And after a bit of discussion, the group–which also includes Magniconte’s wife Darlene as well as fellow pros footballers nicknamed Dasher, Suicide and Brick Wall–decides to christen themselves Kickers Inc.

KICKERS INC #1 definitely had a different flavor from the other New Universe launches. It was at once more bombastic and more steeped in the tropes of a classic super hero adventure series than the more grounded real-world approach that was being applied elsewhere. The book was trying for a spirit of fun, but it bristled up against the restrictions of the line. And atop all of that, the premise of the series was a bit far-fetched and even silly, and was intentionally a bit tongue-in-cheek. It was a square peg being hammered into a round hole–and whether or not it might have been able to make a go of it as conceived, operating within the straitjacket of the strictures of the New Universe, it was the series that was the most D.O.A. Unable to put the characters into the sorts of fantastic over-the-top situations that he envisioned them encountering DeFalco lost interest and began to pull back from the project almost immediately. He only wrote the first two issues, with others such as Jo Duffy, Terry Kavanaugh and Mark Gruenwald stepping in to dialogue issues #3-5 from DeFalco’s plots. Similarly, Frenz departed the book after three issues.

From the point of their departure, KICKERS INC bounced around from writer to writer and artist to artist for the rest of its short run. The tone was all over the place, with certain creators attempting to play the book in a more serious manner, while others seemed to not take its premise all that seriously. It was, by outward appearances, a title that nobody wanted to take over, so it was passed from hand to hand until it fell in the initial axing of half of the New Universe line. DeFalco and Frenz, meanwhile, would migrate over to THOR, where they’d begin a run that would last for several years and spawn the spin-off series THUNDERSTRIKE. As a reader in 1986, KICKERS INC definitely wasn’t what I wanted from my comics–in a period when others were making strides to deliver more mature and thoughtful material to the marketplace, KICKERS INC was a deliberate throwback to an earlier style of comic. Had it been permitted to simply be that, it’s possible that it would have been able to find its audience. But that isn’t the way events played out, so we’ll never know.