Remembering NFL SuperPro

Today is the Super Bowl, that special time of year when young hearts turn to NFL SuperPro.

...Wait, what?

Yes, NFL SuperPro, one of the most widely mocked licensed comics in Marvel's three quarters fo a century. A book that even its own writer would later acknowledge was a stupid idea and he wrote it for free NFL tickets.

Honestly, it was a pretty fun book. Mostly because of the awful.

Produced in collaboration with the NFL and written by iconic X-Men scribe Fabian Nicieza, the series launched in 1991 and ran for only 12 issues. When you really consider the number of comics that have launched and been cancelled since then, often running for more than a year, it's interesting that NFL SuperPro has endured in the imagination of the readership. I'd argue it was likely the Plan 9/Manos factor: the project was so bad it's good...and the fact that seemingly everyone has heard of it, even if they've never actually read the comic, likely keeps that reputation alive.

The series revolved around an armored hero named Phil Grayfield, an ex-NFL player whose career ended as the result of a debilitating knee injury sustained while rescuing a child from an accident.

As you might imagine, Phil living in the Marvel Universe and all, he meets up with a brilliant scientist who's also a crazed super-fan. The scientist develops a near-indestructible football uniform and, when talking to him about it in his new occupation as a sports journalist, Grayfield is taken by surprise when a group of thugs steal a van load of NFL merchandise from the scientist and then torch the place. The end result of so much science-y stuff burning is that Grayfield becomes physically enhanced from being around it all -- and with the uniform he recovers, Grayfield can be a superhero.

Personally, I like to believe that it was the T.A.H.I.T.I. project that transformed Grayfield into SuperPro and that he is in fact Phil Coulson.

...What? It makes as much sense as all those people insisting that Arrow's Diggle is John Stewart because he's black and named John!

It should also be noted that some issues were worse than others, and there were at least a few times that the so-bad-it's-good thing didn't actually hold up. For instance, NFL SuperPro #6 had to be pulled from shelves after the caricatures of the Hopi Native American antagonists turned out to be weirdly racist.

Which is too bad, really, because in other ways it would have been a welcome respite. It was the first issue in which Grayfield didn't deal wit a football-themed threat of some kind, which begs the question: is this happening because of SuperPro? Becuase...well, there's not really that much football-themed crime when he isn't there.

Something that's either awful or hilarious in this book, depending on your perspective, is the fact that the comic can't seem to decide exactly what it wants the NFL of the Marvel Universe to be. At one point, he rescues Lawrence Taylor from a villain called Kabuki-Back, but in others, the comic forgoes the pretense of being in the real world to rescue fictional characters.

His villains, including Instant Replay, sanction and The Almighty Dollar, who shoots coins out of his hands and whose civilian identity was J. Pennington Pennypacker, were unintentionally hilarious high points in the series.

Anyway, Grayfield appeared in a total of 13 comics -- an oversized NFL SuperPro Special Edition #1, followed by the 12-issue monthly series. In spite of the fact he crossed over with Captain America and Spider-Man, he's never appeared elsewhere in the Marvel Universe.

According to The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, he had hoped to use the character in Marvel Team-Up, but was denied due to copyright concerns. Later, he would reference "a guy called SuperPro" in that series as a one-off joke.

The only other quasi-appearance the character has made since the end of his series is the image at right -- a joke pinup in the Marvel Comics 75th Anniversary special.

If you peek past all the black bars and scribble marks, that appears to be SuperPro near Godzilla on the far left, squaring off against ROM, Spaceknight.