CREATOR EXCLUSIVE
Louise Simonson and June Brigman celebrate Power Pack’s 40th anniversary
→ FOUR DECADES AFTER THEY first collaborated on the adventures of Alex, Julie, Jack and Katie Power, Louise “Weezie” Simonson and June Brigman are returning to tell another tale of the superheroic siblings. Billed as a “retro series”, Into The Storm follows on from the continuity of the original Power Pack, which ran for 62 issues from 1984 to 1990.
“This story takes place a year after Power Pack first got their powers, opening at the restored beach house where it all began, and Alex has just had his thirteenth birthday in a recent one-shot comic, so he’s officially a teenager,” says Simonson, referring to 2019’s Power Pack Grow Up. “It’s been especially fun to focus on Power Pack’s early years since some of the Pack’s adventures as older kids have been covered elsewhere.”
“In honour of Power Pack’s fortieth, Marvel wanted to get the band back together,” adds Brigman. “So we went back to the ’80s, and pretty much picked up right where we left off.”
With Simonson joining Marvel in 1980, Power Pack grew out of an edict from editorin-chief Jim Shooter that all editors should also accept freelance assignments in addition to their staff roles. “I didn’t want to take some other writer’s job, so I figured if I made something new, it wouldn’t be taking work from anyone else,” she recalls.
“I came up with the idea of four kids with superpowers, which Shooter said to write up. So I wrote a first complete plot, roughs of the next three issues, and character descriptions for the kids and other characters. Then June Brigman came into my office, looking for work.
“I liked her art but all my books already had great artists, so I asked her if she could draw kids, which is harder than you might think. She said she used to draw portraits of kids and others at [theme park] Six Flags, so I handed her the plot and character descriptions and said, ‘Draw the kids and if I like what you do, I’ll present us to Shooter as a team.’ I loved what she did – the kids were so much themselves and brimming with personality. I turned the proposal in to Shooter and he loved it.”
“Getting Power Pack was serendipity, being in the right place at the right time with the right skills,” continues Brigman. “Weezie asked me if I knew how to draw children and I’d had some experience of drawing kids. At the time, there were lots of artists who were really good at drawing big hyper-muscled superheroes but children, not so much.”
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