Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Wildstorm

Crushing Comics S01E046 – November Collected Edition Haul! Kids’ comics, Deadpool & X-Force Omnibus, WildStorm, & more!

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Today is a true unboxing, as I unpack the contents of my November comics order from the states!

The order starts with a big hunk of books to read with my daughter – The Return of Zita The Space Girl, Coady & The Creepies, and Gotham Academy!

Then, we get to the superheroes – a Hulk Epic Collection, Fantastic Four Marvel Masterworks, the new Deadpool & X-Force omnibus, and DC’s WildStorm 25 Anniversary hardcover!

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Crushing Comics S01E036 – When are you susceptible to change? + Absolute Planetary Volumes 1 & 2

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Do you know what you get coupons for new toothpaste when you move into a new home? It’s not just to welcome you – it’s because moving makes you more apt to change your habits!

It’s fitting that after chatting about changed habits that I pulled out one of the handful of comics that brought me back to collecting when I moved into my first house in 2010 – Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary!

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Comic Book Review: The Wild Storm #1 by Ellis, Davis-Hunt, Plascencia, & Bowland

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I place all remixed songs into one of two categories: enhancing or reimagining.

Some remixes enhance the original. Add more rhythms, speed things up, restructure the song. Other remixes reimagine the original, taking just one or two elements like a vocal or a prominent riff and build a whole new song from scratch – often sans the identifying bass line or chord changes of the original.

I’ve liked both kinds of remixes over the years, but sometimes when I hear a reimagination I think, “Why didn’t they just write their own song?” Aside from a copped vocal hook, sometimes they can be an entirely other creature than the original. Why call it “Song X (remix)” rather than “Song Y (featuring samples from Song X)”?

It’s all a study in taxonomy, I suppose – calling things by a name that will generate the most interest and success for them.

Which brings me to The Wild Storm.

WildStorm was one of the original Image Comics studios and the one with the richest expanded universe of characters. That’s what made it attractive for DC Comics to purchase from original studio head Jim Lee when he wanted to ditch administration to return to illustration, and why the WildStorm characters have continued to appear in DC-published comics for over a decade.

DC has done a lot of different remixes on the WildStorm characters and concepts since they first acquired the publisher in 1999. They’ve published straight-up continuances of the original continuity. They’ve done a trademark soft reset of continuity. They’ve mashed WildStorm into DC’s own history, putting characters like Grifter and Deathblow in league with DC stalwarts like Deathstroke and Amanda Waller.The_Wild_Storm_2017_001

The Wild Storm is something different entirely – a reimagination rather than an enhancement. Warren Ellis, one of the most famous and famously-reliable writers in comics today, has been handed the WildStorm intellectual property as a whole by DC Comics and instructed to create his own reimagination of the original with no strings attached.

Is it recognizable as WildStorm? Is it another great Warren Ellis book? Is it any good.

The Wild Storm #1 (digital)

The Wild Storm (2017) #1, written by Warren Ellis with artist Jon Davis-Hunt, colorist Ivan Plascenia, and lettered Simon Bowland. This issue will be collected in The Wild Storm, Vol. 1.

Warren Ellis has the entire palette of classic WildStorm players to work with to launch his reimagined WildStorm Universe. He selected some of the best characters of the bunch for this first issue, but the story relies on a lot of nostalgic expectations of what WildStorm consists of in order to click.

This is not the unrelenting debut issue you’ve come to expect from Ellis after reading books like Injection, Trees, Karnak, Moon Knight, and even as far back as Planetary. Even on the Astonishing X-Men, a run that left fans lukewarm, Ellis’s first issue was a bomb disguised as a puzzle box.

Compared to all of those, The Wild Storm #1 comes off a bit flat. Maybe it’s because we get to see every side of the main mystery, meaning we know more than the characters (not generally an Ellis hallmark). Or, perhaps it’s that half the issue is spent telling and even repeating rather than showing. [Read more…] about Comic Book Review: The Wild Storm #1 by Ellis, Davis-Hunt, Plascencia, & Bowland

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – WildStorm Rising

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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