The cover to #1 of this series was a pop-up. That’s really all you NEED to know. Force Works was another example of gimmicks and appearance over content. Most ’90s Marvel fit this model.
West Coast Avengers descended into sub-mediocrity and was rebranded Avengers West Coast, which was worse. That series ended and we got Force Works. Tony Stark assembles a team that, instead of “avenging” crime, will stop it before it starts. They have a supercomputer that can predict the future, that’s how they’ll do their missions. Tony names the new team Force Works. I guess he thought “The Preventers” wouldn’t be catchy. And speaking of not catchy, these are the guys he assembles:
Iron Man (himself), Wonder Man and Scarlet Witch are all wicked powerful, so they make sense against cosmic threats. Spider-Woman…OK. I guess so. But U.S. Agent? He’s just terrible. But he’s rebranding himself as simply “The Agent.”
Scarlet Witch is both drawn and portrayed as a sexpot. She deserves better than that.
The first adventure involves preventing a Kree attack on Earth (which started at the end of the Avengers West Coast series), and Black Widow and Vision come along. The Kree have a special weapon that only hurts Vision and Wonder Man.
Oh, and there’s a Rigellan Recorder in the cast too.
Tenney’s art is good–reminiscent of George Perez.
The weapon are The Scatter. They’ll appear in a few more stories but nothing really worth noting about them.
They’re just a generic bunch of swarming aliens.
Wonder Man dies trying to stop them. That guy on the cover of #2 is Century, aka Parallax.
He also becomes a “kind of” team member.
He knows a lot of crap.
I will say that at least this story takes three issues to try to get us to care about another generic space dude with a boring name. Three issues to introduce someone is much more than any of the X-books bother to do in this era of Marvel.
Wanda becomes leader of the team.
OK. That’s what this book will continue to be: Big nonsensical fights. It’s 1994.
Abnett and Lanning, as a writing team, will get much better. They’re learning how to write “big cosmic” in this series. Again, nothing really bad here but nothing really great–and more boring than fun.