Grifter

Wildstorm Omnibus Mapping for the Tigereyes Most Wanted DC Omnibus 1st Annual Poll

May 10, 2024 by krisis

It’s time to dive into the WildStorm Universe – perhaps my favorite shared universe in all of comics! I’ll be loosely mapping missing and most-wanted DC omnibus volumes every day until May 19th! Then, on the 19th, I’ll be joining with Near Mint Condition to launch the first annual Tigereyes Most Wanted DC Omnibus Annual Poll! This post covers omnibuses missing from DC’s WildStorm imprint, including WildCATs, Stormwatch, Gen13, Deathblow, Wetworks, and more!

This post explains potential WildStorm Omnibus Mapping for votes on the Tigereyes Most Wanted DC Omnibus 1st Annual Secret Ballot. I’m posting all of these maps before the poll begins to give people the time to consider their favorites, correct our mapping mistakes, and catch books I might have missed.

There are three comic properties where I own every issue from their inception through 2012. One is X-Men, obviously. Another is Wonder Woman, covered earlier this week. The third is WildStorm. I own every floppy comic book ever published by WildStorm and I have them all packaged for binding – basically, I have this entire omnibus mapping already-collected in shortboxes in my garage!

I have to give a special shoutout to two amazing fellow WildStorm fans: WildStorm4Life, who runs the main WildStorm Universe group on Facebook, and Bryan Jose, who runs the Weathering WildStorm reading order blog. WildStorm4Life was instrumental in aiding my collecting every WildStorm issue by sharing his own binding maps with me over a decade ago!

If you don’t know DC well enough to know what to vote for, stick around for my explanations! Learn why the team behind the poll decided on these books and titles – including giving us feedback if we missed the mark.

If voting is now open, you can use this as your crib sheet! Or… just find some great comics to read!

Remember: These mappings are just my suggestion of how DC could assemble these books. They are meant to help you decide on your votes and build your personal reading list, but your vote on the poll is NOT an endorsement of my specific map. It’s a vote in favor of DC creating a book with that title or covering that period.

High-effort, heavily-researched, over-the-top comics posts like this one are made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis. For less than the cost of a single comic issue a month you can fuel my in-depth comics coverage, plus gain access to dozens of exclusive collecting guides & reading orders – including all of the Crushing Comics Guide to DC Comics.

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Team 7: Objective: Hell (1995) #1-3

November 29, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]This month of reading WildStorm from the beginning has frequently defied my expectations, with my enjoyment of the contents nearly reversed from what I expected.

team-7-v2-03-pinup Team 7: Objective hell tops that list of unexpected outcomes. It’s a riveting, gorgeous, well-written book that merges military themes with superhero powers. There are a few tiny nods to the future of these characters, particularly for Slayton/Backlash, but otherwise this series hardly acknowledges the wider WildStorm Universe and the future it holds in store.

Chuck Dixon shines here even more than on the original limited series. Past needing to introduce his massive cast and take them through multiple missions, this series has both more action and better character moments. No one gets the sort of monologue or grandstanding they did in the first series. It’s all tiny beats that tell us more about the team – particularly Slayton’s temper and the babyfaced Cash’s rise to leadership before an eventual fall from their graces.

Every page of this book looks damned great. The covers truly don’t do justice to the interior pages.

Chris Warner spares no detail in illustrating the jungle environs of Nicaragua and Cambodia. A gang of multiple inkers introduce some variation but fill every page with plenty of contrast for colorist Monica Bennett to make pop with rich greens, golden flesh tones, and Team 7’s red war paint.

The long-haired, well-muscled men of Team 7 have a certain mercurial hint of motion that’s reminiscent of issue #1’s cover artist, the legendary Barry Windsor Smith. The members who we don’t know in the present day stand out the most, with Caitlin Fairchild’s father clearly modeled on Iggy Pop and Grunge’s father Chang drawn more distinctly as an Asian than on the prior outing.

The inspiration for this story seems near to that of The Divine, an OGN I reviewed last year. The difference is that while The Divine was about child soldiers in an eternal war, Objective Hell is about a small bubble of peace that Team 7 is forced to disrupt for the greater good.

Was a greater good achieved? There’s no question that removing low-yield nukes from the grasping Khmer Rouge is a positive, but the open psychic warfare between US and Russian forces signaled a new front of the Cold War that Team 7 found themselves alone to defend. While they escape with only one serious casualty this time, it helps to frame their later choice to splinter and become mercenaries. As long as the specter of their reassembling as a team exists in the world, the US Government will find some threat that demands their intervention … but does their existence also escalate the seriousness of the threats?

Team 7: Objective Hell doesn’t hold those answers or very many keys to the big questions we’ve been asking about Backlash, Grifter, Dane, Lynch, and Cray, but it is a superior WildStorm offering that makes me wish we had an ongoing comic to add more past missions to Team 7’s published history.

Want a recap? Keep reading for a summary of how these soldiers became super. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. Tomorrow is the main event! WildStorm Rising! Let’s get ready to cross over, baby!

Need the issues? This series has not been collected, so you’ll need to grab the singles – try eBay or Amazon. Since further series hit these same issue numbers, be sure to match your purchase to the cover images in this post. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Team 7: Objective: Hell (1995) #1-3

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Warblade: Endangered Species #1-4, Grifter: One Shot (1995), and Maul in “Thinking Big”

November 24, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Today I’ll tackle the three WildCAT spinoffs published to date – Warblade’s mini-series, a Grifter One-Shot, and a Maul solo story in Image Rarities.

warblade-endangered-species-0001 While Grifter eventually getting his own title was fait accompli, at this point it feels like Warblade is the least deserving of all the WildCATs who merited their own sideline series. At least Maul has the dichotomy of being a modern art loving nerd by day and a massive purple hulk on the battlefield. Maybe that’s why Warblade needed his own series so badly – because his narrative arc had been treading water ever since Killer Instinct.

Hearing Warblade’s internal monologue across four issues helps to solidify his character. He isn’t ruled by rage at all times as we’ve seen in the heat of so many battles. He can be cool and analytical, but he’s also not the best tactician, which leads him into unfortunate situations when his rage takes over and he prepares to strike.

Steven Seagle delivers solid workmanship and well-structured issues, which is exactly what WildStorm needs in growing out its cast of characters. Scott Clark’s name is welcome sight on pencils, having disappeared for several months after his stellar work launching Stormwatch. His output isn’t quite up to that par, with his figures getting increasingly gawky starting in issue #3.

By contrast, Grifter has been the breakout star of WildCATs from their first issue, which makes his flaccid one-shot a puzzler. Steven Seagle spends as much time having Grifter think about women as objects as he does having him show any kind of charm or expertise. The story adds a useless layer of backstory in addition to Zealot’s training and Team 7. It feels like the worst sort of Marvel book, that adds in layers of complicated history just because it can and then is quickly ignored (usually because, like this one, it kills all of its interesting new characters).

Finally, we come to Maul, the art-loving romantic who is also the WildCATs’ biggest bruiser. He was highlighted in an original story by Mark Waid called “Thinking Big” in Wildstorm Rarities. It’s a quick tossaway tale about Maul catching a runaway jet in his hands, but it makes clear that even in his smaller iterations as Maul the intelligence he has as Jeremy is inaccessible. It’s these little human moments that WildCATs had been missing – but, it also didn’t have a master like Mark Waid writing it.

Want the full details? Keep reading for a deeper breakdown of the plot. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. Tomorrow, finally, it’s back to Stormwatch with#17-21 & Special 02! Plus, while I’ve got a copy of WildStorm Rarities handy, I’ll cover the other stories from that issue – which occurred quite some time ago in continuity.

Need the issues? None of these issues have been collected, so you’ll need to hunt them down as singles (though Grifter and Rarities are actually both perfect-bound books): Warblade: Endangered Species (Amazon / eBay), Grifter: One Shot (Amazon / eBay), and WildStorm Rarities (Amazon / eBay), which is a perfect-bound book with a spine.

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Team 7 (1994) #1-4

November 21, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]In 1994 there were just a handful of comics writers you would pursue if you wanted to read a terrific war comic. Chuck Dixon was likely at the top of that list (along with Larry Hama).

Thus, after two years of WildStorm when it was finally time to expose the Team 7 connective tissue shared by almost all of WildStorm’s books, it was Chuck Dixon who Jim Lee and Brandon Choi tapped to pen it.

team-7-v1-01-pinup The original Team 7 operated in the 70s consisted of this list of eleven largely familiar names:

Team Leader John “Topkick” Lynch
Berckmann
Stephen “Wraparound” Callahan (whose death we saw on the first pages of Gen13)
Cole “Dead Eye” Cash (AKA Grifter)
Phillip “Bulleteer” Chang (father of Gen13’s Grunge)
Michael “Deathblow” Cray
Jackson “Arclight” Dane (of Wetworks)
Alexander “Slaphammer” Fairchild (father of Gen13’s Caitlin Fairchild)
Andrew Johnson
Richard “Boloround” MacNamara
Marc “Backlash” Slayton

Team 7 was a vastly different comic book from WildStorm’s norm up to this point. No heroes, no brightly-colored spandex, no supernatural threats.The mini-series is part war story, part psychological thriller as the elite team is subject to experiments against their will, pushed to the very limits of survival, and pitted against each other in a series of psychological tortures. In fact, though it includes super-powers, they ease their way into the story and are treated as an extension of interpersonal conflicts rather than weapons to be casually wielded.

Penciler Aaron Wiesenfeld starts off with the gritty realism that marked Dixon’s run on Marvel’s ‘Nam, but by the final issue he is channeling Barry Windsor-Smith in a series of dynamic full-pages and broad faces. Seriously, issue #4 is so darn pretty that my review could just be posting its pages in their entirety. Check out this marvelous opening sequence of Deathblow’s mutiny told in four full-page splashes:

team-7-v1-04-02 team-7-v1-04-03 team-7-v1-04-04 team-7-v1-04-05

Aside from Deathblow’s familiar wide face, it’s nearly impossible to tell apart the team of white men (even the one Chinese man is drawn Caucasian) until you’ve committed their various facial hair and face paint symbols to memory. That’s not a weakness, but a subtlety – just as is Craven being drawn to resemble our modern day John Lynch while Lynch’s own face gradually morphs into that shape.

As a standalone story, Team 7 would be marginal – a bunch of stooge soldiers get set up again and again as their team shrinks from attrition. In the scope of what we already know about so much of the cast, it’s fascinating – explaining relationships and filling in detail that had only been implied. For me, this is the reason to read this (and other) Team 7 miniseries in order of its release rather than in order of continuity.

Without knowing the future story of these characters, all you’d get is that Cash is the golden boy and Lynch is under Craven’s thumb, while missing Dane’s early killthrill that must eventually transform into the cool-headed company man, Slayton’s deadly quiet under pressure (his best characterization yet), and Chang’s easy-going nature (presaging his way chill son).

Dixon and Wiesenfeld perfectly shoulder that burden, aside from the team stumbling headfirst into four traps will stretch your disbelief to the max, burden. They keep the book readable while only deepening the mysteries of Craven’s intent and how the team eventually splinters into the heroes we know and the dead men we don’t.

Want the play-by-play? Keep reading for a summary of how these soldiers became super. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. Tomorrow I’ll get my first taste of WildCATs without Jim Lee, and it’ll be a big bite – issues #15-19. After that, the second arc of Wetworks, Warblade’s miniseries and a Grifter one-shot!), and then finally back to Stormwatch!

Need the issues? This series was collected in a 1994 TPB (eBay), or you can grab the singles – try eBay or Amazon. Since further series hit these same issue numbers, be sure to match your purchase to the images in this post.

And now, onto the story! [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Team 7 (1994) #1-4

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Savage Dragon #13 & WildCATs #14 (Image X Month)

November 17, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Stormwatch’s “Images of Tomorrow” wasn’t the only gimmick going around Image’s books in the summer of 1994. “Image X Month” saw all six image creators swapping flagship books with each other, with Jim Lee and Erik Larsen trading WildCATs #14 and Savage Dragon #13, respectively.

I couldn’t find another blogger who wanted to write you 100 posts this month, so I stuck with “Blog of Tomorrow” as the theme rather than “Blog X Month.” ;)

savage-dragon-013-lee The trade offers a fascinating glimpse into the minds (and work ethics) of a third of Image’s founders.

Lee delivers a beautifully penciled issues at Image with Savage Dragon #13 even with an army of finishers, but it’s effectively a Grifter one-shot guest-starring Savage Dragon.

Larsen tries hard to single-handedly give the WildCATs a lumpy but fun one-off adventure that shows off their entire team but also promotes his hapless Freak Force book, and mostly succeeds.

(Larsen would also later release his own version of Savage Dragon #13, wanting to maintain his unbroken streak of penciled issues.)

Savage Dragon #13 comes first, and though it doesn’t say so you really have to have read Kindred to make heads or tails of it.

That’s because Grifter is suddenly hanging out in a Chicago restaurant with a romantic interest Alicia (who presumably has plenty of free time if this happens after Gen13, since Lynch is AWOL).

We learn that Grifter grew up in Chicago and that he worked for “The Syndicate” (a mob network) from the casual opening scene. Unfortunately, the pair of lovebirds happen to be in the same place as Savage Dragon’s sting operation. Everything quickly goes south as Grifter inserts himself into a massive shootout that leaves both him and Dragon’s partner wounded.

The rest of the issue unravels just how Grifter is connected with a mob that’s being investigated by Savage Dragon and infiltrated by I.O.. Plus, the mob has a super-powered baddie trying to usurp the business.

Altogether it’s a little bit too much coincidence piled on top of itself, especially when we discover a family connection for Grifter. All of the interweaving effectively makes Savage Dragon a guest star in his own story. He periodically shows up to threaten Grifter and then acts as his muscle in a final fight.I t could have easily been avoided without adding the I.O. element, which is meant to give Alicia some agency in the story but just renders her a damsel in distress.

I get the sense that Lee and Choi didn’t study up on Savage Dragon as much as Larsen did WildCATs, but I’ll be damned if Dragon doesn’t look utterly awesome in every panel he appears.

WildCATs #14 follows (maybe directly – I’m not sure that any other WildCATs adventure fits between them, though it’s a handy gap for anything that includes this full original team.)

wildcats-v01-014 Larsen gives the WildCATs one thing they haven’t yet encountered – some frivolous fun. His lightweight tale has no big life or death stakes, but it shows the team confidently cutting loose both in battle and (briefly) in relaxation.

Larsen’s WildCATs are a rough-looking bunch in battle, although he does them the credit of showing them defeating a Daemonite right on the first page of the book – Void is even conscious, and Spartan in one piece! However, Voodoo has had enough of the constant Daemonite-hunting, and demands a break.

Larsen’s casual team is a much better-looking bunch as they prepare to hit the beach (with Larsen mocking Choi’s tendency to use every possible adjective and explain them all with editorial boxes). Just before their departure, Maul hears a news report about an old friend injured in a super-human rampage (one side of which was Freak Force member Mighty Man) and puts a hole in the wall of his room in his eagerness to check on her.

The teams clash until Savage Dragon arrives to break things up, and Larsen playfully teases the tropes of the book, affirming some (Maul being big and dumb, Spartan getting ripped to shreds, Warblade basically being John Patrick’s character from Terminator 2) and mocking or reversing others (Void actually being effective, Zealot getting sucker punched while monologuing about her training).

The art on WildCATs #14 is beneath the typical Jim Lee par, but no one at the time compare with Lee’s slickness outside of his WildStorm protegés. Larsen’s rubbery action-figure fights and plain, expressive faces are effective, especially in the plain clothes scenes. It only goes to show how reliant WildCATs has been on the Lee factor to keep it moving, which should make the next arc a fascinating read.

Need the issues?

WildCATs #14 by Larsen is collected in The Savage Dragon, Vol. 4: Possessed (ISBN 978-1582400310) along with Larsen’s own version of Savage Dragon #13 (Amazon / eBay).

Savage Dragon #13 issue by Lee and Choi is collected in the 1998 trade paperback Savage Dragon: Team-Ups, ISBN 978-1582400471 (Amazon / eBay), but is not included in the later Savage Dragon Archives line, which includes’s Larsen’s #13 instead.

For single issues, Try eBay (WildCATs #14 / Savage Dragon #13) or Amazon (WildCATs #14 (alt link) / Savage Dragon #13). Since further WildCATs series reached #14, be on the lookout for this Larsen cover to make sure you get the right issue. And, remember, Larsen released his own, totally-different Savage Dragon #13 – and both versions are referred to as “#13a” in different places.

Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read – tomorrow we’re already back to Stormwatch with #14-16 as they edge inexorably closer to their grim end!