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WildCATs

Guide to WildCATs – now available to the public!

April 13, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

I’m back with another public release of one of my new Guides to Indie & Licensed Comics. While my Indie Comics Month full of new guides was meant to cover all of the first year of Image Comics launches, there was one guide that inspired me to want to cover Image Comics in the first place – all the way back in 2017. As it happens, this team is celebrating their 30th Anniversary with a brand new ongoing series at DC Comics – which means there are thousands of curious fans out there ready to put my WildCATs Guide to good use!

WildCATs Guide

This WildCATs Guide covers every issue of Jim Lee’s co-flagship for his WildStorm line of comics, which was one of the launch imprints of Image Comics in 1992. Later, in 1998, Lee sold the entire imprint to DC Comics. But, DC kept WildStorm’s titles mostly separate from their own books for over a decade, only introducing occasional crossover events to signal that WildStorm was part of the DC Multiverse.

That started to change in the New 52 in 2011, which launched with two of the traditional Wi ldCATs roster in books of their own – Grifter and Voodoo. However, the rest of the team never materialized along with them! Instead, the other WildStorm co-flagship – Stormwatch – was woven into DC’s prime universe continuity.

A decade later in their Infinite Frontier era, DC finally began to make moves to bring the WildCATs back to action. Writer Matthew Rosenberg used back-up stories in Batman: Urban Legends as a backdoor pilot to integrate Grifter into the present day of Gotham City. Zealot and the rest of the team weren’t far behind, and in 2022 Rosenberg relaunched them into their first shared-universe series since 2011!

One of the great things about WildStorm comics being a part of DC is that they’re now included on DC Universe Infinite! DC is slowly but surely converting classic WildStorm titles to digital for their all-you-can-read subscription program. My Guide to WildCATs includes links to read each series digitally.

Want to know more about Jim Lee’s WildCATs? In addition to my WildCATs Guide, check out my 2017 “Blog of Tomorrow” month for recaps of the first 20 issues, plus #0, Special, Trilogy #1-3, and WildStorm Rising! And, read my Guide to WildCATs Launch Essay for why I think they’re a lot weirder than the X-Men.

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: DC Comics, Image Comics, Jim Lee, New Comic Book Guide, WildCATs, Wildstorm

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.

WildCATs: Covert Action Teams (1992) #1 textless

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.

[Read more…] about WildCATs – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

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!)

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Jim Lee, Joe Casey, New Comic Book Guide, WildCATs, WildStorm Universe

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade

December 6, 2016 by krisis

It’s back, girls and boys!

I had so much fun reading and writing about the WildStorm Universe in November that I’m not quite ready to go back to just reading it, so I’m going to file the occasional continuing readalong post on a much lesser intensity and frequency because I so do not have the time or stamina to write about 126 WildStorm comics every month.

While I’m very eager to pick up all of the books exiting WildStorm Rising to check out their new status quo, I’m going to use the next few installments to review later WildCATs solo outings that fit into pre-crossover continuity – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade One-Shot, the Spartan: Warrior Spirit mini-series by Kurt Busiek, Zealot’s three-issue mini-series, and some WildCATs anthology stories.

This makes for a fantastic moment to pause and call out a really phenomenal blog: Weathering WildStorm. The author is undertaking this endeavor slightly more slowly than I have been, but he is doing it with the benefit of having read almost all of these books before. As a result, he’s got a fairly well-reasoned reading order that explains how these various side-stories fit. It’s by far the best one I’ve seen on the web in the four years I’ve been getting books together for this read!

Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade was published in August 1995, a hair later than WildStorm Rising, but per Weathering WildStorm’s guidance it directly follows either issue #13 or 14 (and maybe explains why the team was so ready for a break in #14-15). It follows up on Steve Gerber’s strong story in WildCATs Special #1.

The issue begins with an intriguing (and beautiful!) opening scene of all women, including Providence and Destine from Special #1 facing each other down in the remains of Yurgovia.

The next page is an ass-shot of Zealot followed by she and Voodoo fighting while dressed in their best Vampirella outfits. Those art choices are not just for the benefit of one splash page – this issue takes its “Skin Trade” name literally and gives a heavy dose of T&A whenever possible courtesy of artist Michael Lopez.

I’m tempted to write this one off as pure wish fulfillment, but there is considerable plot content tangled up with all the skin. Skin Trade turns Voodoo into a bit of a Mary Sue murder doll at points, but it gives context to her more active role in her own psyche in #18 and then on the battlefield in #19 and WildStorm Rising. It also greatly deepens Zealot’s history, if not her character, and creates a (largely unfulfilled) plot hook.

And, if you can tolerate a heaping of cheesecake, Lopez’s art is truly remarkable throughout the book save for a few pages with one bad inker on a solid team effort.

Final verdict? If you’re going all in on a sequential WildCATs read you ought to include this, but if you’re simply revisiting the high points of WildStorm you can skip it.

Continue reading for a recap of Skin Trade‘s plot. Need a copy? Check Amazon and eBay. As for what’s next, I still need a bit more of a breather to work out a schedule for my my leisurely readalong. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: From The Beginning, From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe, Gary Martin, Image Comics, Michael Lopez, Steven Seagle, Voodoo, WildCATs, Zealot

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – WildStorm Rising

November 30, 2016 by krisis

It’s the grand finale of my daily read of the first three years of WildStorm Comics – WildStorm Rising!

WildStorm Rising is the first direct crossover between any WildStorm books. Just like here at CK the WildStorm crew doesn’t do anything halfway – their first crossover hits every one of their eight ongoing titles, adding a prologue and a pair of bookends for wildstorm_rising_tpb11 total issues:

  • Team 7: Operation Hell #1
  • WildStorm Rising #1
  • WildC.A.T.s #20
  • Union (1995) #4
  • Gen 13 (1995) #2
  • Grifter #1
  • Deathblow #16
  • Wetworks #8
  • Backlash #8
  • StormWatch #22
  • WildStorm Rising #2

The crossover is really only meaningful to a trio of them – dual flagships WildCATS and Stormwatch, and the debut of Grifter. Everyone else is merely a bystander in the culmination of a year-long plot launched in Stormwatch to alter the struggling status quo in WildCATs.

There are pros and cons to any linewide crossover, and WildStorm Rising is no exception.

On the pro side, the event manages to accomplish something that few Marvel crossovers could manage back in the 90s (and still can’t today): Each chapter worked well as an issue of its own book advancing some of its own themes. That’s true despite the fact that many books weren’t written by their typical authors and many of them continued directly to the next title in the crossover sequence.

Plus, we really do get a new status quo for several books, none more so than WildCATs!

On the con side, WildStorm Rising squanders Defile’s long-running infiltration of Stormwatch in favor of him chasing a McGuffin of power discovered in Team 7: Objective Hell. Many of the pillars of plot that support this crossover were built from Defiles machinations, so it feels like a massive cheat to see his master plot lose steam just as WildCATs and Stormwatch come to blows. He almost literally says, “Screw my plans that have been built up in Stormwatch since issue #6, now I’m going to focus on this other thing.”

stormwatch_v1_022-textlessEven worse, in a hairpin final turn of plot it turns out the McGuffin has no real meaning. It was merely a red herring to bring back a fan favorite character squandered too early in the life of the line!

What is this amazing McGuffin? It’s both a key and a symbol. It’s about the balance of power in the ruling class of Daemonites. When they arrived on Earth in a space ship chasing the Kherubim, there was a natural division of power between politics, military, and (sort of) transportation. A representative of each held a key to the ship that also signified their unquestionable ruling power. All three would need to align their keys to activate interstellar navigation technology so none could shift the balance of power too far towards government, military might, or (one would imagine) commerce and colonization.

The transportation key was lost in the ship’s crash, which left the political and military arms of the Daemonites stuck in a two-party struggle for planetary power for 2,000 years with no means to escape. Now, the two pieces of the lost key have showed up in possession of a rogue Daemonite and a member of Team 7. Both sides of the Daemonites are racing to collect the pieces while the assembled might of our heroes try to defend them (while resolving their inter-squad squabbles).

Is WildStorm Rising worth a read? As a self-contained event it’s nothing special. However, if you plan to read any other WildStorm books from 1995-1997 – like Grifter’s solo series or Alan Moore’s WildCats – it’s a good primer. (It’s far back enough from Ellis’s takeover on Stormwatch to be irrelevant there.)

The rest of this post is split into two sections. The first reviews each issue of the crossover (w/links to purchase) with relatively few comments on plot. The second second offers a plot recap of each issue so you can fill in the gaps of your read if you don’t own every issue.

Want to read the entire thing in one go? All of the material aside from the prologue is collected in a single TPB (Amazon / eBay).

wildstorm_rising_002-full-cover

[Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – WildStorm Rising

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: Barry Windsor-Smith, crossovers, Event Comics, From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe, Image Comics, James Robinson, Mike H, Steven Seagle, Stormwatch, Travis Charest, Void, Whilce Portacio, WildCATs, Wildstorm, WildStorm Rising

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