WRITER EXCLUSIVE
The first offering from the NacelleVerse sees ’80s toy line RoboForce making a return
NUMEROUS OBSCURE toy lines such as Biker Mice From Mars, Powerlords and Sectaurs: Warriors Of Symbion have now been assembled into a shared universe, called the NacelleVerse. It’s launching with RoboForce, which is currently being turned into an animated series, coproduced by the Nacelle Company and Dwayne Johnson, and Dany Garcia’s Seven Buck Productions. Spinning out of last month’s NacelleVerse one-shot, it will be preceded by a three-issue miniseries from Oni Press, which acts as a prequel to the cartoon.
“It sounded like a really fun challenge to try and work to reintroduce them in comic book form,” says writer Melissa Flores, who is working closely with Nacelle’s Brian Volk-Weiss and Matt Kravitsky. “Brian has such a specific vision on how he’s planning on adapting these properties and the way he’s updating and redeveloping them is unique to every property.”
Created by the Ideal Toy Company in 1984, RoboForce was revived by Toyfinity in 2013, who subsequently sold the rights to Nacelle in 2021. “It’s become something completely brand new and the characters have been forged into relatable, complicated heroes,” says Flores. “It’s so fun to see these robots being given a completely new life. I’ve been very lucky that Brian and Mike have given me the flexibility and opportunity to give these characters real stakes and take them on an adventure that has very real consequences that ripple into the [animated] series itself.”
Illustrated by Diogenes Neves, RoboForce centres around a group of advanced robots, who were created by genius Soraya Aviram in order to help change the world, only to be superceded by rival Silas Duke’s superior Utopia Aegis 101 line of bots.
“Our story takes place in a future version of Detroit, where Earth has become home to robots, humans and aliens alike,��
