I was never what you would call a “game guy”, especially during the very early days of video games; I completely missed that point. So I really can’t explain why one of my favorite comics of the 1980′s was DC’s Atari Force. Gerry Conway (and later Mike Baron) did their best with a fairly conventional standard space opera premise. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before but a ragtag band of misfit outsiders protect an uncaring Earth from a masked cosmic villain, this one called Dark Destroyer (you could tell him apart from all of the other 80′s masked cosmic villains because he had a red color scheme). Our main hero was the angry young man Christopher Champion, which you’d think would be enough of a hero name but because he could also teleport across dimensions has also got saddled (for no good reason) with “Tempest”. I found Dart, an Irish/Indian mercenary telepath (even if she was colored the same gun metal gray skin tones most Middle Easterns were saddled with at DC Comics until at least the early 2000′s) much more interesting, as well as the alien looking aliens (Morphea, Babe and Pakrat) that made up the rest of the cast. But I’ll be honest and admit I stuck around through the series 20 issue run primarily because of the great artwork by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez.

I cannot and will not argue for a moment that it was one of the best comics of that era but it was definitely a lot of fun. I don’t make fun of people when they wax nostalgic about Micronauts and Rom Space Knight so I hope you’ll all give me a pass on this one.