Alan Moore

Supreme – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

New for Patrons: Guide to Supreme

March 29, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

Yes, it’s more of my Indie Comics Month! This new guide for all Patrons of CK is for one of Image Comics’ most-acclaimed titles of the 90, and here’s the shocker: it came from the mind of Rob Liefeld! Of course, the acclaim came much later, when Alan Moore arrived to transform Liefeld’s character. Read all about it in my Guide to Supreme!

Guide to Supreme

No one was more surprised than me to learn that Rob Liefeld’s steroidal Superman riff turned into an Eisner Award winning comic only a year after I gave up my 90s comics addiction! [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Supreme

WildCATs – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and reading order for WildCATs in omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, and digital comics. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics. Last updated April 2023 with titles scheduled for release through August 2023.

In 1992 there was no hotter artist in comics than Jim Lee. That meant his Image Comics flagship title WildCATs launched to immediate and massive popularity – maybe even before Lee and his creations were ready for it.

Jim Lee pencilled his first issue of X-Men with writer Chris Claremont in May of 1989 with Uncanny X-Men (1963) #248. X-Men was already one of the most-popular comic books in America, but Lee’s gradually takeover as the primary artist from fellow Image founder Marc Silvestri elevated its popularity into the stratosphere. That popularity climax two years later in August 1991 when the launch of X-Men (1991) #1 became the highest-selling modern comic, selling millions of copies driven largely by Lee’s complete redesign of the cast as splayed across four covers.

Lee’s final work on X-Men arrived just a year later on X-Men (1991) #11 in August 1992 – the same month he launched WildC.A.T.s (1992) #1 at Image Comics with childhood friend Brandon Choi on scripting duties. In the interim, Lee’s character designs started pop up everywhere – from merchandise, to toys, to the revered X-Men: The Animated Series – which debuted in October 31, 1992. No other comic artist had more visibility for their work than Lee in the early 90s.

While WildCATs is often labeled as an off-brand X-Men, Lee’s concept for the series is closer to Marvel’s Inhumans and Eternals than their X-Men. The members of his team were all descendants of a pair of warring alien races who crashed to Earth millennia ago. The Kheribum seemed brave and majestic while the Daemonites in their truest form resembled Aliens or The Brood. The team payed out that ancient conflict in the modern day, making peace between Kheribum factions and hunting rogue Daemonites. (Over the course of the series, we learned that those first impressions weren’t the whole truth).

Lee had proven to be a fast penciller on X-Men, but he was now penciler, plotter, and co-founder of what was suddenly the most-popular comic company in America. The entire Image Comics line was hit by delays, including WildCATs. Lee was determined to pencil every issue of his pet creations, but filled in the gaps between his issues with a Special and a three-issue limited series penciled by Jae Lee. The book was always gorgeous, especially in a marquee crossover with Marc Silvestri’s Cyberforce. However, the plot and script never quite stood up to the majestic pencils. This is where the book slipped into X-Men comparisons, with familiar character archetypes that felt a lot like Cyclops, Jean, Wolverine, and more.

Lee lasted just two more issues on WildCATs than he did on his X-Men relaunch, bowing out of regular penciling duties with issue #13 in September 1994. Scripter Brandon Choi departed the title with Lee, turning it over first to James Robinson with Travis Charest through issue #20, and later to the grand wizard himself, Alan Moore in July 1995. While Robinson hewed close to Lee & Choi’s original concept, Moore exploded the cast and concept to focus on societal conflicts within both alien factions.

While Robinson and Moore were ultimately good for the growing lore of the team, that meant that the “classic” WildCATs line-up only had a year of surface-level stories for fans to enjoy. Meanwhile, that initial cast (along with Lee’s designs) were featured in an animated series that launched in 1994 with an accompanying toy line. As the comic grew increasingly intellectual and far less toyetic through the 90s and into the early 2000s, many fans still had an expectation that it would “play the hits” of its first two years of issues (when really there weren’t many “hits” in that run).

WildCats has been revived several times over after Lee sold his WildStorm creations to DC Comics in 1998 and joined the company as an executive. However, Stormwatch’s transformation into the mega-popular The Authority took the spotlight off of WildCats as the marquee team of the WildStorm universe. It was Stormwatch and Authority that continued to generate higher-selling series with more spinoffs. Meanwhile, a fourth WildCATs volume meant to be scripted by Grant Morrison and pencilled by Lee fizzled after just one issue in 2006.

In 2008 Christos Gage relaunched WildCATs (alongside an Authority relaunch) with an all-inclusive, fan-pleasing cast alongside an equally-massive, world-ending plot. In a way, this volume felt the closest to Lee, Choi, and Robinson’s original 20 issues, even though it took advantage of the swell of characters and concepts that had been introduced in the intervening 15 years.

Unfortunately, the run was cut off by DC’s Flashpoint. While individual team members like Grifter and Voodoo graduated into New 52 with their own ongoing titles, New 52 never once brought together the full team, with Warren Ellis launching a completely separate universe of The Wild Storm to reimagine the core of the team.

After a full decade of clamoring from fans, finally DC began to introduce WildStorm characters into their main continuity – including the emergence of Grifter in Gotham City under the pens of James Tynion and Matthew Rosenberg. After much teasing, that lead to WildCats relaunch at the end of 2022. Shortly after, DC announced plans for The Authority to be one of the anchors of their new cinematic universe. After years on the margins of DC Comics, 2023 finally found Jim Lee’s WildCats and Stormwatch back in the spotlight in the DC Universe.

New for Patrons: Guide to WildCATs (& WildStorm Events!)

March 8, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

I’m back with another Indie Comics Month guide for all Patrons of CK! This is the guide that was the first itch I had to create indie comics guides more than six years ago when I first launched mu Patreon campaign! At the time, I couldn’t believe that anyone would spend time on a guide page for an Image launch title from 1992 whose comics continuity was dead in the water. Now it has a hot new book to its name in the main DC Universe! That’s right, it’s time for a guide to Image’s fourth flagship title, the co-flagship of Jim Lee’s WildStorm imprint that later joined him at DC Comics. It’s a brand new Guide to WildCATs.

Guide to WildCATs
This guide is now available to all readers thanks to the wild ongoing support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis!

(Bonus: I also launched a quick Guide to WildStorm Events with every line-wide event in reading order.)

I know this material well, not only because I loved WildCATs back in the 90s, but because I was in the middle of putting together a complete run of WildCATs for binding when we moved to New Zealand! I have personally hunted down every issue in this guide without the help of a guide. This is a page that held absolutely no surprises for me.

That’s not the case for WildCATs itself, which I think is a book that would surprise a lot of people if they read beyond the famous first thirteen issues by Jim Lee. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to WildCATs (& WildStorm Events!)

Youngblood – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and reading order for Youngblood in omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, and digital comics. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics. Last updated March 2023 with titles scheduled for release through August 2023.

Youngblood was the first ongoing Image Comic, which kicked off Rob Liefeld’s multi-decade journey to recapture the lightning in a bottle of his transformation of New Mutants into X-Force.

Many comic fans love to make light of Rob Liefeld’s artwork – especially the way he draws teeth (so many!) and feet (if they even appear on panel). However, Liefeld’s true strength has always been as much as an “Idea Guy” as an artist. His ideas, built upon the bedrock of Claremont and Simonson, are what turned New Mutants into a title facing impending cancellation into one of Marvel’s hottest comics and made X-Force (1991) #1 one of the top-selling comics of all time.

While some of those ideas were unique to the Marvel Universe, some of the characters and designs had been simmering in Liefeld’s brain and on his sketchpads for nearly a decade. You can see many recognizable designs in Youngblood, not only for Marvel characters like Cable, Deadpool, & Sabretooth, but also for DC characters from Liefeld’s fizzled pitches there before forming Image Comics.

As ideas go, Youngblood was a great one – even ahead of its time. It combined elements of Captain America -style super-soldiers, a government-sanctioned team like 80s Avengers or 90s X-Factor, and the concept of superheroes as major media stars. (Ironically, Liefeld’s own X-Force would later run with this idea as it transformed into X-Statix). Even within that mash-up there were many other plots – including Russian spies and heroes indebted to hellish characters.

Altogether, Youngblood had all of the ingredients to be the Avengers of the Image Universe to Jim Lee’s WildCATs as the X-Men.

The unfortunate thing about Rob Liefeld being an “Idea Guy” is that his ideas don’t often come paired with follow-through when he is self-publishing. If he has a chief legacy in comics beyond the creation of Cable and Deadpool, it’s that his own series very rarely reach a conclusion. This was evident from the start with Youngblood, which took nearly three years to release just 10 issues.

In fact, every Youngblood ongoing series ends teasing a next issue or story before disappearing into sudden cancellation. This is true of the original Image series, the Maximum Press and Arcade comics years, and all three of the subsequent Image Comics revivals of the 00s and 10s!

If there is a positive side to the many failed iterations of Youngblood, it’s Liefeld’s stubborn dedication to his pet project. He always recruits high-calibre talent to write Youngblood, which peaked with Alan Moore briefly driving the franchise at the turn of the century. While this has generated some bona-fide hits with books like Prophet and Glory, he can never seem to allow Youngblood to move on without tinkering with it himself.

And, even as the franchise changes creators with each iteration, Liefeld has ensured that Youngblood’s continuity (such as it is) has never been fully rebooted. Every subsequent series launches as some form of a continuation of what came before (and went unresolved), often progressing in real time alongside the real world rather than using a sliding time scale. That means the 25th Anniversary reincarnation in 2017 really was set decades after the book’s debut!

Unfortunately, the ability to continue Youngblood’s story is now out of Rob Liefeld’s hands. The rights to the team are administered by Terrific Production LLC, a production company with little to no inclination to produce any actual comic books.

There may never be a complete and completely-satisfying Youngblood comic series. Yet, the roughly 100 issues that have been published since 1992 are packed with a tantalizing mix of character designs and plot threads. Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood may not have always told the best stories, but it had some great ideas.