You young 'uns think LIEFELD was bad? In the 1990s, we had bad Liefeld IMITATORS.
WEAPON: P.R.I.M.E.:
The X-Force series in the early '90s was wonderful fun for me as a comic book reader of about 12-14years of age. It started out pretty damn stupid, with Rob Liefeld's plotting and art being oh, so dated (though it's fun to read just for that, to be honest), and everything was all EXTREEEEME with guys running around just hacking each other apart, and new characters being introduced every single issue, straight off the pages of Robbie's sketchbooks (a similar problem befouled most of the early Image stuff in the '90s as well). When Fabian Nicieza took over full plotting with the Image X-odus, and had a fresh group of hot young artists (Greg Capullo & Tony Daniel mainly), things got a whole lot better. Cable became more of a father-figure than an insanely-violent hard-ass, Cannonball became a strong leader, Shatterstar gained a personality instead of just being Captain Stabby, Warpath was less of an angry stereotype, etc. It still comes across as fairly generic and sometimes silly today, and wasn't A-level storytelling by any means, but it was neat and I still get nostalgic for it.
Weapon: P.R.I.M.E. (PRototype Induced Mutation Echelon, as it was revealed later, and I'm sure you were DYING to know the acronym) was part of the Liefeld years, with Nicieza left to pick up the pieces later. See, when the book was still "The New Mutants", we saw the introduction of Cable and the Mutant Liberation Front that hunted him, as Liefeld just kept COMING UP with stuff to put into the once-dying book after it was drilled into the ground by the Simonson/Blevins creative team of doom. But then we got introduced to even MORE guys, like Deadpool, Domino & Gideon. When the book was re-tooled as X-Force, our first issue saw G.W. Bridge, a high-end guy at S.H.I.E.L.D., dealing with the aftermath of an X-Force op and talk about how he used to know Cable and that he was hunting him now and stuff. He calls in "Weapon X", and we meet a whole new group of guys devoted to hunting down Cable:
-Bridge, an old teammate from their "Six Pack/Wild Pack" days, now with the backing of S.H.I.E.L.D. now that he's no longer a mercenary. He is the basis for Chapel, a carbon-copy Liefeld made for his Image books.
-Garrison Kane, another Six Pack guy, now a cyborg after he was badly injured thanks to Cable during the group's last op. He's now the new "Weapon X" and wears the ugliest red vest you've ever seen.
-Grizzly, the last Six Pack guy left (Domino is another, and Hammer is a paraplegic spy-aide now). He's an enormous red mutant with guns (because it was the '90s).
-Rictor, formerly of the New Mutants. He quit the team to look for Wolfsbane, but now they retrofitted a bad past- Cable apparently murdered his father (since we know Stryfe looks like Cable by this point, the true story isn't hard to figure out)
-Tygerstryke, a generic background goon and Canadian mutant.
-The Yeti, who is clearly a Wendigo with an inhibitor collar on, meant to do Canada's bidding.
This was HEAVILY planned-out and built-up over the course of a year (12 issues), with us getting more and more info in each story, but Rob Liefeld quitting the book threw a wrench into the plans. You could practically FEEL Fabian Nicieza just want to deal with all that crap right away, and so we had the big "WP vs. X-Force" brawl take place in a SINGLE ISSUE, with Bridge's crew flying right in and blowing into X-Force's temporary base. And after all this planning, all this money... and they basically got their asses kicked. Tygerstryke & Yeti were easily defeated by Siryn & Feral, respectively. Rictor talked big and threatened his old teammates, but eventually defected. Kane got his arm chopped off, but managed to take out Shatterstar. Grizzly got KO'd by Warpath pretty handily. And then Cable shot Bridge up, taunted him while looking like the Terminator (half-metal skull face and all), and then their base exploded thanks to Tolliver. All in one issue.
The fall-out: Most of Weapon: P.R.I.M.E. disbands; Bridge quits S.H.I.E.L.D. in a huff, Grizzly & Yeti go missing, and Kane does his own thing after that. We don't see them for over a year (a lifetime in the X-books of the day), and only in a sub-plot. Domino & Grizzly meet back up after all these years, and decide to go traipsing around for the missing Cable & X-Force. They end up in Canada, where it turns out Weapon: P.R.I.M.E. is active as a group of government-based operatives now led by Tygerstryke! The group now consists of whatever designs Greg Capullo felt like tossing out, as 'Stryke is joined by Yeti again, plus Double Trouble (a duo of plasma-wielding mutants) and Killjoy (a generic blade-wielder). They get all of one page of introduction before everything is casually mopped-up and Dom & Griz escape, and that's it for this team.
Their final appearance is in the pages of that god-awful "See! A Gay Superhero! Too bad we can't think of anything good to write about him!" Northstar Limited Series, when Tygerstryke leads the squad in on the Alpha Flight mutant. And that's it. An entire year of build-up for this epic X-Force-beating team, and they get mopped up in a single issue, and are generic background jobbers in another couple. Comics are so weird sometimes.
These guys just SCREAM "jobber". Bridge is just a generic soldier/merc guy with an issue, Kane is god-awful both in design and power-set ("My arms can come off!"), Grizzly is so '90s it's not even funny (mutant powers PLUS guns), Yeti is a devalued cool background villain, Tygerstryke is nothing, and the others are just costumes with no personality attached. They are a classic case of "Nineties Villain Team", something that befell The Acolytes, The Mutant Liberation Front, and the Dark Riders, among others (virtually every single Image book featured this as well). They all have the same stuff in common: A bunch of thugs with little personality, meant to oppose the heroes directly. Most of them are just a unique costume idea by the artist, with nothing attached to them. They usually have punny or "Death" oriented names. For some reason, the '90s was obsessed with having entire groups of guys for teams to fight, no matter what. And most teams had more than one or two of these groups fighting them! X-Force had the ENTIRE M.L.F., a gang of about fourteen characters, going after them, but then ALSO added in these guys!
Thus I must stat them. Suckiness of this magnitude should be rewarded.
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