Editing Night Force (section)

==Publication history==
The first ''Night Force'' series was launched in August 1982 in the midst of a collapse in the [[horror comics]] market, with most titles in the genre being either cancelled or on the verge of cancellation.<ref name="Back27">{{cite journal|last= Kingman|first= Jim|date= April 2008|title = Forces of the Night, What Horrors they Faced: Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's ''Night Force''|journal= [[Back Issue!]]|issue= 27|pages= 71–74|publisher= [[TwoMorrows Publishing]]}}</ref> Despite this, writer [[Marv Wolfman]] felt (and publisher [[DC Comics]] agreed) that ''Night Force'' could be a success: {{quote|''Night Force'' was my idea, as I was looking for another book to do and felt I’d like to create my own horror title and push the boundaries a bit more than I had with ''[[Tomb of Dracula]]''. I really wanted to try something different and thought I had solved the problem of doing an [[anthology series]] by doing it with continued characters. The idea was to write for the older audience, with darker and more realistic stories than had been done at that point.<ref name="Back27"/>}}

''Night Force'' was the first collaboration between Wolfman and ''Tomb of Dracula'' penciler [[Gene Colan]] since Wolfman convinced him to join the staff at DC. Both Wolfman and Colan did extensive creative design work for ''Night Force'' before working on the actual issues, with Wolfman charting out the characters' astrology and Colan doing multiple drafts of each character's visual design.<ref name="Back27"/>

After only 14 issues, ''Night Force'' was cancelled due to an underestimating of the series's sales. Wolfman explained, "... DC wanted to have ''Night Force'' be one of the first direct-sales books, where I believed it should be [[newsstand]] only. I felt the [[comic shop]]s appealed primarily to the [[superhero]] fans while ''Night Force'' would appeal more to the casual mainstream reader, who might not have bought comics otherwise. We got the comic-book shops' sales early and it was canceled based on those, but when the newsstand sales finally dribbled in we actually sold pretty well".<ref name="Back27"/>

Thirteen years later, ''Night Force'' was revived as part of the [[Weirdoverse]] line. The creative team included Wolfman but not Colan, and did not carry over the plot threads from the original series.<ref name="Back27"/>