One of my favorite titles from Marvel's Epic line, besides Alien Legion, was the cut short series "Stalkers", which lasted 12 issues but left the story incomplete. Created by Jan Strnad and Mark Verheiden, early artwork by Mark Texeira, then Val Mayerik and others.
It was published in 1990, and set in a late 1999 where terrorism has been on the rise, fringe groups with axes to grind on the rampage. The answer has been the private anti-terrorist outfit Stalkers, Inc. Founded by major corporations as a way of recouping rising security costs, it's a franchise, complete with noted operatives having fanbases. The book's also in that very narrow late 80s-very early 90s window where some near-future fiction featured Dan Quayle as President.
There's a certain satirical edge to the series, even as it gets dead serious in the shithole year of 1999.
The first two issues deal with a terrorist situation in Detroit, where a local car lot has been taken over
but this is just a distraction so disgruntled ex-auto workers lead by a delusional former car company CEO can take over his former offices' now owned by a Japanese firm. Never mind that he negotiated the buy-out in the first place, and was obviously forced out because he's nuts...
Somehow, these terrorists got their hands on US military nukes, which went missing from an Army convoy and in the
fallout aftermath of the Detroit situation, Stalkers' CEO, a hard-nosed ex-Marine named Tiernan sends for an operative, a grinning psycho named Snow who volunteered for a procedure that turned him into a "sleeper". The search leads them to a rogue bunch of Army types funneling the latest weapons into the black market, except one silly fellow decided to go into selling nuclear devices on his own.
Meanwhile, a mystery man rendered an amnesiac by chemical interrogation is rescued by a Stalkers team, survives an assassination attempt in the hospital and after a failed attempt at getting a job at a fast food joint (and walking into a skirmish in the war between rival chains) decides to sign up at a place where the skills he can still remember may come in handy.
As the series comes to an early end we have concurrent storylines, "John Doe" is murdered and psychic Stalkers operative Julie Ahmarra tries to get a read off of him of his last memories. Normally she can only pick up recent, short-term memories of the deceased, but trying to read "Doe" sends her into overdrive as she begins to tap into his instincts, abilities, and memories of the mysterious "Circle" he worked for as an assassin, putting her in the sights of one of their other operatives, a murderous eco-terrorist femme fatale. In what's left of L.A., where many freeways are abandoned along with the gas guzzler cars that were abandoned to rot on them thanks to the aftermath of the "Oil Wars", local Stalkers franchise head Wong has to deal with goons holding a movie studio hostage, demanding they destroy all copies of their upcoming animated rap musical remake of "The Last Temptation of Christ". And an insane Stalker wannabe manages to get himself involved in the operation, partly due to Wong's reluctance to actually be involved in front-line action himself.
"We're not Christians! We just hate rap music!"
