"The Call"
Cover Date: October 1994
Writer: Steven Seagle
Artist: Ken Hooper (pencils), Barbara Kaalberg (inker)
Plot
In Northern Ireland, a hero named Jack O'Lantern flies in to save a girl from a burning school bus. He has your standard comic book Irish accent, as is mandatory under the Chris Claremont Accents Directive of 1981. Anyway, he saves the girl, but accidentally get her cut with glass in the process and so immediately gets depressed and is glumly walking away when a mysterious old lady shows up and tell him to go into the water.
Elsewhere, a guy named Dr. Mist is using his foster daughter as a medium. The daughter foretells that a bad guy named 'Cataclysm is about to appear. On the next page, a random guy named Harold Ross is in Peru, throws himself into the well in a village, and Cataclysm flies out. The girl's prophecy might have been more helpful had she given it more than five seconds before it came to fruition, but, well, I guess being an oracle is an inexact science.
Hong Kong! Some guy named Silver Dragon fights a guy named Claw! The old lady from before shows up and Claw disappears into a pool of water. That's some succinctness I can get behind!
Oh, and the broken-down Red Tornado flies out of the Grand Canyon, where he had been just kind of lying there, and in Louisiana, a character named Golem is getting hunted down when he too disappears into a pool of water. All of these characters are terrible. I mean, even the Red Tornado is pretty awful.
Back in New York, Dr. Mist calls a meeting of the Leyman, who, as far as I know, made exactly one appearance before this issue, in Zero Hour, where a bunch of them got killed as part of the crossover. The remaining Leymen immediately resign en masse rather than deal with Cataclysm, and tell Dr. Mist to find new Leymen.
Dr. Mist is less than thrilled, but, well, what's he going to do? He heads to the pool of water that summons new heroes and begins the ritual, which is interrupted when Cataclysm shows up and starts drowning Dr. Mist is the pool. I don't know that I would trust a single character in this book to save us from a villain named 'Minor Inconvenience' let alone a guy named 'Cataclysm'.
But wait, there's still one character left to introduce. There's a woman, she's teaching a karate class, she's from New York, her name is Meridian, and she also falls into a pool of water. Wait, 'Meridian'? Come on, book, I know it's the mid-90's and all, but would it have killed you to use a little subtlety?
Anyway, at long last our heroes come together as they appear in the room where Dr. Mist was summoning them from, just in time to meet his drowned corpse. Claw immediately starts trying to kill everybody, and Dr. Mist wakes up just in time for the issue to end. To Be Continued!
Commentary
Actually, this isn't too bad of a first issue (it's technically labeled #0 because that's just how things were in 1994), it introduces all of the new characters in pretty economical fashion, which is pretty hard seeing as the only character anyone had heard of before this issue was Red Tornado, and he's reduced to a broken-down mute shell.
For what it's worth, it also does a good job of explaining why makes this super-team different than the other dozen or so team books DC was publishing at the time. Granted, the 'ancient, mystic order intakes new members to take on a new crisis' isn't a completely fresh idea, but, well, it's a start.
The biggest problem this book has, and what probably ended up killing it 15 issues later, is that no one really cares about any of these characters. I mean, who are they? I actually looked it up, and it turns out that most of them actually were pre-existing characters, which surprised the fuck out of me.
I don't really have a lot more to say negatively about the book. I mean, it's pretty good, but it's not so great that I really feel compelled to learn anything else about the characters or read any more issues of Primal Force.
Damage Stars: **
Bonus
Part of the problem with Primal Force is that it came out at time when there were tons of similar team books. Here's a list of all the team books published in October 1994, when this issue was released:
Justice League (Pre-Morrison version)
Titans (Last gasp of Wolfman version)
Outsiders
Extreme Justice
Justice League: Task Force (Christopher Priest version)
Darkstars
Legion of Super-Heroes (Reboot version)
R.E.B.E.L.S.
Xenobrood
That's a lot, and most of those were pretty dire. That version of the Justice League was probably the worst extended run that franchise's history. In fact, the only titles on this list that weren't completely awful were Justice League: Task Force (and that had problems of its own), and the Waid Reboot Legion. Still, asking Primal Force to survive that crowded environment was too much.
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