The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1044: WildC.A.T.S: Covert Action Teams #2, October 1992 (What I Missed in the 90s Week, Day 4)

Alright, a perfunctory entry to make up for my slacking.

Jim Lee has always struck me as the most talented of the Image founders - he's a good artist and a good storyteller, he sticks to his strengths, and has other people script his stuff most of the time. It's important to acknowledge your strengths and allow others to help you with things you're weaker at. Perhaps that's one of the problems of the Image experiment, at least initially. The people involved wanted so badly to be autonomous that they forgot that sometimes it's good to have people help you. Witness the great comics that came out of McFarlane's invitation to other writers.

Lee does things slightly differently, in that he's got in-house writers, from what I can tell. Which is a great way of brand-building, which of course leads to  Wildstorm being one of the most recognized of the former Image studios.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 783: WildC.A.T.S. Annual #1, February 1998

Upon beginning to read this comic, I was very confused, and figured that I'd missed a previous issue or something. Not so. It's one of those times that James Robinson reminds us that he's actually a pretty good writer, Captain America v.2 notwithstanding, and that we've been dumped unceremoniously in media res into this little tale of mad aliens. And not the aliens you'd think. A virus is infecting all of the Kherubim and Kherubim hybrids on Earth, and right now Mr. Majestic (basically the Wildstorm Superman) is headed toward Earth, ostensibly to destroy it. Stormwatch holds him off on the Moon while the rest of the WildC.A.T.S. team searched for a cure. Oh, and various members start to lose it during the mission. Though it's maybe a bit of an old set-up, the way in which the story is pulled off lends it a sense of urgency that's fun to read.

Today's featured creator is Larry Stroman, penciller of today's comic. I will tell you the thing that leapt out at me immediately about Mr. Stroman's work: the women in the comic have...wait for it....*gasp*....varying body sizes! Rather than a Wildstorm Universe populated by supermodels, we actually have characters who look like they might need to wear size 8, or even 10, jeans. What gets me about this realization is how strange it looks, how much it actually stands out, when one is reading a superhero comic. We become, as readers, so trained as to what to expect from our comics that when we see something even slightly different, it's quite a marked difference. And for it to be something like this lets one recognize the "normalization" process that's been working on readers for decades within the hobby.

That aside, Mr. Stroman has a strange idea of what Voodoo's hair does. But, as his style is very stylized, one can look past such things as unrealistic depictions of hair.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 631: Backlash #6, March 1995

Backlash's quest to restore his lady-love and defeat the Daemonite S'yrn comes to a conclusion in today's issue. With the help of his pals in Wetworks and WildC.A.T.s, Slayton corrals the warlord, gets the technology he needs, and wakes Diane from her coma. Much, of course, to the smitten Taboo's chagrin.

I am glad to see the end of this story, as it means that perhaps we'll get some more interesting, or less-canonically motivated, stories in future issues. Backlash seems to me to be one of those characters who is just dying to break away from the grittiness of his world and origins, and I would love to see the creators take a chance with him. That said, it's a comic from the early 90s, so I'm not holding out too much hope. Comics from that era surprise me only seldom.

This issue does have one of the more brutal depictions of a Daemonite execution. I know they're evil lizard-y things, and we're supposed to dislike them, but Backlash mists his way inside S'ryn, and then bursts out of him like an Alien (ironic, given what happens to Stormwatch a few years hence), ending the creature's threat. Image comics are brutal, occasionally.

I'll keep on with Backlash, at least for a few more issues. I'm curious to see where these characters go. Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 629: Backlash #4, February 1995

I'm trying to sort out whether it says something bad about the main characters in this comic that they've had more famous supporting guest stars in every issue so far. I noted in an earlier post that the integration of the Image (though really, it's the Wildstorm part) universe is pretty fantastic, but now I'm noticing the preponderance of it in Backlash,and I'm wondering if it's simply lazy. That said, the guest appearance do seem to do their job in bringing in readers - the series ran for 32 issues, which is actually pretty impressive for an early Image title. The strategy in those early years really seemed to be throw anything at the wall and see what sticks.

I'm enjoying Backlash for what it is - a superhero comic that takes itself waaayyyyy too seriously. But I think it needs to come out from under its Team 7/Stormwatch origins, and give the character some room to develop on his own. Slayton's an interesting character, and has what seems to me to be a really awkward power (those whips coming out of the tops of his hands just look weird), and a grim 'n' gritty past. Rather than the series being a reaction to past events, I wonder what it would be like if he started having new and novel things affect his life. Perhaps we'll find out.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 628: Backlash #3, January 1995

Backlash continues with exactly the sort of shenanigans you'd expect from an Image/Wildstorm comic at the end of the 20th century. Guest star Savage Dragon is joined by Zealot, Emp, and Void of the WildC.A.T.s. As I was mentioning yesterday, this is a remarkably well-integrated superhero universe, and I feel like the guest spot of the WildC.A.T.s is a bit like how Superman ends up guest-starring in most new DC titles, or Spider-Man in Marvel titles.

Anyway, this whole issue is pretty much a fight sequence. The fact of this betrays one of the primary problems with early Image comics as far as I'm concerned. Having an entire comic be a fight sequence is just bad storytelling. Since one is limited to a single issue per month, a well-constructed story is going to offer not only action, but also plot development, characterization, and, most importantly, variety. This comic doesn't really do that. Yes, the fight is exciting, though there are some strange notions in Brett Booth's art of how the human, or semi-human, body actually works, but we get very little characterization of our focal character - he spends about half the comic being unconscious while Dragon takes on the villain, and then half the comic fighting Dragon when he tries to arrest him. Maybe that shows that he's kind of a badass, but I think we already got that from the rippling muscles and constantly gritted teeth.

So I guess we'll see tomorrow where things go. And that's actually another of the problems I have with these Image comics - they're entirely predictable. This comic is going to continue to be about a character (or characters) that are grim 'n' gritty, and there'll be espionage and action, but they never quite ask those same kind of questions that the superhero comics of the other publishers do. It's like every character in the universe is Wolverine.

*sigh* Onward.