You knew it had to happen. My great comics re-read has brought me to Wildstorm comics, the line around which my interest in comics was rekindled back in 1999 or so, and which introduced me to Warren Ellis.
lI've actually been reading them for a couple of months now, having shifted from Vertigo to the America's Best Comics sub-imprint of Wildstorm (specifically League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, volume 1). Wildstorm is kind of an odd creation, since it started as one of the founding books of Image Comics, when Jim Lee decided to write and draw WildC.A.T.s, his own X-Men knock-off.
It's... not awesome, at least at first. The art was pretty good, as you'd expect, and the concept of an alien proxy war taking place on Earth was pretty fun, but WildCATs (I'm going to write it like this from now on) does feel like an overwrought Chris Claremont-era issue of Uncanny X-Men. At the time I picked up, and still own, the entire first mini-series, and I remember getting the first issue of Stormwatch, though that's a book that didn't survive an earlier declutter.
I gave up on Image after a while, and didn't think about any of it for a couple of years, until I started hearing about books like Planetary and The Authority. I can't remember exactly how I got wind of them, but it could have been the owner of a comics shop across the street from UC Irvine, who helped turn me onto a number of good books at the time, especially with his graphic novel lending library.
In the intervening years Wildstorm had expanded into its own little universe, separate from Image and then acquired by DC, and had also convinced a number of good writers to rejuvenate it. So we got Alan Moore blowing up WildCATs with his Homecoming and Gang War storylines, as well as Warren Ellis revitalizing Stormwatch. Even Gen13 got turned from a constant cheesecake-fest to a decent book, thanks to manga-enthusiast Adam Warren. Its sub-imprints also formed the home of Cliffhanger (J Scott Campbell's Danger Girl and Joe Madureira's Battlechasers) and Homage Comics (Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's Astro City, which is another of the best comics of all time).
So the collection I still have is the initial WildCATs run from the early Image launch, a WildCATs relaunch by Scott Lobdell and Travis Charest, the Ellis and Mark Millar runs of the Authority, and Planetary. There are also a couple of stray issues of Gen13, along with the first collection from its ongoing series, but I felt a bit embarrassed reading that - there was a heavy emphasis on the female characters' state of undress and sexuality (including a dated and kind of off-putting subplot of Freefall being squicked out by Rainmaker's bisexuality), and a sense of humor that fell flat more often than not. The second storyline also featured art by Jim Lee, which should have been promising, except his poses and body shapes were all bizarrely inhuman and off-putting. That collection is slated to go to Goodwill next time I have a cull.
More successful is the Stormwatch and Authority collection. Warren Ellis used Stormwatch as a vehicle to explore some of his political and conspiratorial preoccupations, as well as interrogating the nature of superheroism through teams like The High, which were essentially thinly veiled allegories of the Justice League. Sadly I only have the A Finer World storyline, which introduced the characters and concepts he'd explore in The Authority, but it's a nice showcase of Bryan Hitch's art.
In some ways The Authority feels dated now, as the discussion of superheroes actually making the world a better place has been supplanted by unease at the idea of superheroes running around and doing whatever they want. Marvel's cinematic universe sidesteps this idea, and DC's tries to engage it but not always successfully, but the upshot is that the Authority seems dead as a concept - at the very least I can't find evidence that DC is doing anything with it now that it's integrated the Wildstorm universe into its overall DC universe.
All the same, Ellis and Hitch's issues of The Authority are gorgeous. They go by in a flash, because of the widescreen, decompressed storytelling that Ellis was playing with at the time, but Hitch's art is amazingly detailed, and helped immeasurably by Paul Neary's inks and Laura Depuy's coloring (later Laura Martin).
Then Mark Millar and Frank Quitely took over, and the book lost something. It started strong, with a story about a search for the Spirit of the 21st Century, and despite loads of violence and gore, a largely peaceful resolution of the arc. But then it fell apart with the second storyline, and went seriously off the rails with the third, when delays in Frank Quitely's art and Mark Millar's scripts meant the book took ages to come out. It had devolved into a morass of violence and snark and, frankly, facile storytelling, so that I've never really been able to warm to Millar's work since then.
And now I'm on Planetary. Like Authority, it can feel dated at times. And also like Authority, it features a staggering number of thinly veiled Justice League analogues, which makes me wonder how you can swing a cat in the Wildstorm universe without hitting a Superman clone. But it still lands as a metaphor, in which uncommon super-characters investigate how an evil Fantastic Four has distorted the world of pulp and adventure fiction by making us forget about the origins of the medium we love.
It's also helped by the gorgeous and idiosyncratic art of John Cassaday, who seems to me to be one of the most detailed comics artists I've ever seen. Bryan Hitch seems to thrive on epic vistas with starships and armies clashing, but Cassaday has an impressive grasp of facial features and dynamic movement.
Unfortunately I never got to buy the final issues, so I don't know how the story ends or how most of the mysteries that Ellis lays down are resolved. I suppose I could go looking for the trade paperbacks, but I have the sense those aren't the easiest things to find either.
Still, it's always amazing to me to imagine that Wildstorm went from an X-Men knock-off to the home of some of the best comics of the past 20 years. Even if I didn't love what Mark Millar was doing with the Authority, it was at least different from the mainstream DC and Marvel work of the time, which felt so much like the same stuff they'd been doing in the 80s and 90s.
It's also a little sad to me that the Wildstorm universe died a death - first being destroyed by a crossover and then being subsumed into the wider DC universe, so that now Superman clones like Apollo and Majestic can actually hang out with Superman. Warren Ellis tried resurrecting the universe a couple of years ago, but it didn't feel the same, like a place of infinite weirdness and possibility - rather it was just more of the same nihilism and grimness. So maybe it's my own tolerance for that type of story that's waned?
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