Who Watches the Nightwatch Part 5: I Left My Plot In San Francisco

"I am vengeance.  I am the night...watch...listen, I'm still working on this."
(Web of Spider-Man Annual #10, art by Mark Tenney and Keith Williams)

I was gonna go all amateur-hour David Brothers on y'all and talk about how Nightwatch was Marvel's first headlining character from the then-kinda-new black middle class, but then I remembered Deathlok who a) came first, and b) was in a way better book.  So...yeah, let's just talk about Nightwatch.

Who Watches the Nightwatch Part 4: Ongoing Nightmare

If asked, Stan Lee will deny ever presenting this book.

Face it, Nightwatch - you just hit the jackpot.  It's 1994, and, off the strength of a dozen appearances in various Spider-Man books, you just got your own series.

It's important to remember that the comics business was booming back then.  Anything and everything was getting greenlit.  Let's take a look at what else Marvel was publishing in April, 1994:

Who Watches the Nightwatch Part 3: Crossoverkill

Hey, remember those new-character 1993 annuals I was talking about in our last installment?  Well, Web of Spider-Man had one, too, introducing not one, not two, but three new characters!  Vortex, Dementia, and Shard are...the Cadre!  Who?  Yeah, pretty much.  Forget about them, they suck.  Marvel annuals of the late '80s and early '90s were jam-packed with backup stories, and this one is no different.  One of those just happens to be another Nightwatch story, written by Terry Kavanagh with art by Mark Powers and Hector Collazo.

And then...OBSCURITY!

Who Watches the Nightwatch Part 2: Failure to Launch

February, 1993.  In the past few months, several of Marvel Comics' top talents have fled the company to form Image Comics, and their new creator-owned books are selling like hotcakes.  Without Lee, McFarlane, and Liefeld, Marvel is reeling.  It's time for something new.  Something bold.  Something that would be exactly like that book McFarlane is writing, Prawn or something.  Get me Terry Kavanagh.

Man, they missed a perfectly good opportunity for him to say his own logo there!  I love it when guys do that.

Who Watches the Nightwatch Part 1: Respawn

4thletter! is a great comics blog.  As a Venom aficionado, I've especially enjoyed Gavok's We Care a Lot feature, a series of articles which chronicles the character's "lethal protector" escapades through the '90s and beyond.  For the next little while, I'd like to shamelessly rip him off emulate him, and run a similar series about a character's obscure '90s adventures.  But here's the twist.  I'm not going to write the article about a character like Venom, who's been featured in movies, TV shows, and made into innumerable action figures.  That would be too easy.  Too enjoyable for both me and this blog's tens of readers.  Instead, I'm going to write about a character nobody likes.  A character that nobody ever liked.  Not even me - and I like Cardiac.

"Where's my mini-series?  Annex got one!  Annex!"
(Web of Spider-Man Annual #10, art by Mark Tenney and Keith Williams)