8. Power Pack vol 1 #12 ... Marvel ...

There was a time, a little experiment called Power Pack survived a full five years plus. Why was it an experiment? It was a book about a family where the kids gained super powers without the parents' knowledge. So while some are excited and want to be heroes, others just want life to continue as is. And in the midst of all that, as their powers came from aliens, there are the aliens intruding into their lives. During the height of its popularity, many fanclubs spawned with fanzines that went beyond the original 5-year-run. This was before the age of the internet. Imagine people from all over communicating via slow mail, sending artwork and short stories to be collated, printed and mailed back to all the members!!!

That was the type of book Power Pack was - inspiring fierce loyalty amongst its readers

And off and on, I did buy the comic though I was not a regular reader (but I could always refer to my sister's stash!)

Try this if you don't believe me on how good it can be. Number 12 marks the first full year and normally, during comics of that era, you get a double sized issue but here, it isn't. It's a continuing saga of the lives of the 4 kids and their sentient spaceship. As the cover shows, the Morlocks are the featured (so-called) villains of the piece and here, while what they do may not seem so bad in the books but if you think about it, it's horrific!

One of the Morlocks is lonely, an old lady whose kids are killed by humans. As she can project her emotions, that made life with her a nightmare. So some of her Morlock friends decided to go to the surface world to kidnap some kids for her and they needed kids with powers. Hence, the Power  Pack. On top of that, amongst the Morlocks, there are those who can scramble the kids memories and even twist their features to "uglify" them to Morlock styles. Ugh!

That's the crux of this story - child kidnapping. Naturally the remainder of the team had to rush to rescue and recruited X-Men Kitty and Nightcrawler along the way for a showdown below

The ending is quite sweet and touching and I do not wish to disclose it here but hope that you will seek this book out and give it a try (8/10)