Broken Frontier

According to The Enforcers creator Carl Herring Jr., the major impetus driving the book’s development is nostalgia for the simpler, action-packed comic books of the 1980s. Nostalgia has and likely always will have a huge influence on comic books. In a medium where continuity and canon are examined with the shrewd intensity of a biblical scholar by multitudes of rabid fans, the desire to return to past events and immerse oneself in the singular tone or feel of a specific era is a difficult temptation to ignore.

I understand where Herring Jr. is coming from. Some of my favorite runs in comics occurred during the 1980s, from Gerry Conway and Chuck Patton’s dissolution of the Justice League of America and its subsequent rebirth in Detroit to Jim Shooter’s game-changing Secret Wars maxi-series. I had (and in some cases still have) entire runs of Spider-Man, The Avengers, the aforementioned Justice League of America, and X-Men, dating from that epoch in comics history.

The thing is, most of us still buying comics in this modern era of character-driven stories have matured and become more sophisticated as we’ve grown older. A funny thing to say perhaps, when discussing funny books but we crave characters, events, and settings that we can relate to. Many of the comics published in the eighties still had that simple, elegant sheen of innocence that had been a staple of the medium up until about 1986, when DC published Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. After those seminal works hit the shelves, it was as if comics finally left adolescence behind and entered the realm of adulthood, exploring themes and ideas only hinted at previously.

I’m not so sure there’s any going back from that realization that the world is a lot more complicated than how Shooter or Conway had depicted it in their stories. It’s kind of like watching The Cosby Show in syndication. You can’t imagine how you found the trials and tribulations of the Huxtable clan so funny in the first place.

And that’s my major complaint with The Enforcers. The book is like a time capsule preserving all of the characteristics of a time and place the medium has left behind a long, long time ago and as much as I hate to admit it, I need a little bit more from my comics nowadays than cardboard characters and overwrought melodrama.

Even books like Conway’s Justice League of America and Shooter’s Secret Wars provided fans with well-rounded characterization set against epic conflicts. Conway, of a necessity, had to focus on the characters of his new Justice League. Aquaman, Vixen, Zatanna – heck even the unfortunate Vibe – drove the plots of the Detroit League as much as, if not more than, the obstacles they struggled to surmount.

What Herring Jr. and collaborator Tod Smith give fans in The Enforcers is a frozen moment in time that captures the superficial tone and visual look of the 1980s without any of its subtle (yes, I said subtle) undercurrents of characterization and development writers like Claremont, Shooter, Conway, and Wolfman understood were necessary to keep an aging audience hooked.

It’s laudable that Herring Jr. wishes to celebrate the comics published in the 1980s with a book that evokes that era’s unique tone and look. However, an empty revival that ignores the fact that his target audience is likely the same folks buying more sophisticated, nostalgia-inspired books like JSA or Atlas, will continue to fly under the radar if it doesn’t…well, grow up a bit.

As much as I hate to admit it…