This book was one of the big unexpected finds I made during my first visit to Xanadu Comics in Wilmington, Delaware. I was constantly on the hunt for obscure bits of comic book history–there was nothing quite like the thrill of coming across some old super hero property that was a forgotten, hidden gem–and I found copies of THE ENFORCERS #2 and #3 while leafing through a section of magazine-sized back issues. I’d never heard of either the title or the company, Graphics 2000, before, but I immediately snatched the two issues up. And the reason was the presence of the name Larry Houston on both of them. A year or so earlier, Larry had work published in a single issue of Charlton’s short-lived showcase title CHARLTON BULLSEYE, and his strip The Vanguards really struck a chord with me. I had no idea who he was or where he came from, but I definitely wanted to see more of his work. So the fact that there was some entire other super hero series that he had worked on floored me.
Today, of course, Larry Houston is best remembered as a director and storyboard artist on any number of excellent animated series from the 1980s and 1990s. He directed portions of the G.I. Joe movie and revamped the 1994 FANTASTIC FOUR cartoon into something that was thereafter watchable. But most critically, he was one of the key contributors to the 1992 X-MEN animated series. But most of that was still waiting for him in the future at the time when I stumbled across these two releases in the back issue bins. I just knew that I liked his work based on that CHARLTON BULLSEYE story. I was, perhaps, the first genuine fan of Larry Houston that didn’t know him personally.
THE ENFORCERS was a self-published venture, a quasi-fanzine dedicated to a super hero universe devised by Houston and his circle of friends. Three issues were released in total, all of them in black and white with the latter two sporting color covers. The first crude issue came out in 1975, and only a few hundred copies of it were made. I would search for that first issue for fifteen years before finally stumbling across a copy at a random dealer’s stall at the San Diego Comic Convention one year in the 1990s. These later two issues were released in 1979, at a time when Houston was also contributing material to other fanzines such as Phil Iro’s WOWEEKAZOWIE.
The Enforcers were a super hero team made up of individual characters who had been created independently. They are, to put things bluntly, pretty much an equivalent to the Avengers, with one big difference that was immediately notable to me in 1982: a decent percentage of the characters were black. Given that Larry himself is African-American, this comes as no surprise, but at that time, in 1982, while black super heroes weren’t quite such a novelty anymore, you really didn’t tend to see more than one of them on any specific team. It was very much like a quota system, there would inevitably be one black member who was there to represent, and who was defined by their race more than anything else. So seeing a group in which there were three separate black members knocked me out a little bit. I had grown up in a red lined section of Long Island, and it was only upon relocating with my family to Delaware that I experienced full integration, so my discovery of this book was well-timed to reflect my own experiences. I’d gone from a school system in which there were only one or two black students to one in which fully half the student body were kids of color.
It was clear from the editorial material in these two issues that Larry Houston and his partners, including scripter Gar Haywood, had grown up in the 1960s on a steady diet of Marvel Comics, in particular the ones crafted by Jack Kirby. THE ENFORCERS was an overt attempt to recapture the flavor of those 1960s books, and it does a credible job of it, though it’s more driven by pastiche than genuine invention. The editorials talk in code about how the modern 1970s versions of the books had lost what made them special: Spider-Man was beset by so many personal problems that he made you sick to look at him, the Thing was being annihilated by villains he’d have clobbered in his heyday, and the length of each issue had shrunk to less than 20 pages per story. These were all developments that the creators of THE ENFORCERS swore not to let befall their cast of characters.
THE ENFORCERS boasted a large cast of characters, and the fact that I was coming in with issue #2 meant that I had to get caught up on events on the fly. so beginning with the basics: the Enforcers were a super hero team comprised of the Centurion (who had been shot with radioactive bullets that wound up giving him a bevy of mental powers), the Sorceress (daughter of the team’s otherworldly enemy Helicon), Omegon (a Thor surrogate who was empowered by an alien warrior species), the Gemini Twins (an astronaut who had been divided into two separate people in the manner of a Captain Kirk transporter accident, each one with different abilities) , Gravity Girl (a flighty valley girl type, the Wasp figure of the group), Thunderbolt (who would manifest a metallic shell that would make him super-fast and explosive) and Black Beauty (a Pam Grier-style government operative who gained super-strength and durability from a radioactive serum.) This issue opens with the origin of Andromedon, a fusion-empowered anti-hero whom the team’s recurring nemesis Helicon tricks into battling the Omegon, hoping to eliminate the most powerful Enforcer. It’s all very operatic and bombastic in that Lee/Kirby way. Consequently, I ate it up with a spoon.
The book also included full-page preview advertisements for other prospective series that would never come to be. But this gave the line the feeling of being a lot larger than it actually was, and I spent years searching for other publications connected to it. In a sense, this was all exactly what I had been doing with my own homemade efforts at creating comics, albeit nowhere near at this level of professional polish. THE ENFORCERS was rough, driven by fannish enthusiasm moreso than skill, and it wore its heart and its influences on its sleeve. But it was everything that I loved about comic books at this point in my life, and so I embraced it whole-heartedly. As I said previously, in those pre-Internet days, I spent years trying to locate issue #1 as well as any subsequent releases, only to not be able to dig up much information at all about any of it.
In recent years, however, Larry has collected the three-issue run of THE ENFORCERS into a print-on-demand trade paperback collection that’s available at Indy Planet. A few of the character names got changed for copyright reasons, but it’s a lot easier to source than what I had to go through. And it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg either. https://www.indyplanet.com/larry-houstons-the-enforcers
And I’m not sure how often it gets updated, but Larry Houston’s professional website can be found here: https://www.larry-houston.com/
The Tom Brevoort Experience 