WILDCATS #8-10
Casey and Phillips take over the Wildstorm flagship.

Writer: Joe Casey
Artist: Sean Phillips
Colorist: Wildstorm FX
Letterer: Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Saida Temofonte
Three issue story-arc
Published by DC/Wildstorm 2000
$2.50 each

Reviewed by Pindaros

While there's something to be said for books being the product of a single creator or creative team, it is also mighty gratifying when a superhero book falls into different hands and develops the basic concepts of the book in an entirely new direction. Otto Binder on Superman, Denny O'Neil and Frank Miller on Batman, Chris Claremont on the X-Men and Walt Simonson on Thor; all wrote classic stories that used the background offered by an on-going series to develop novel stories unimagined by the heroes' creators.

Jim Lee's and Brandon Choi's WILDCATS started out, like many of the Image superteams, as a more adult variation on the X-Men model, in this case with alien genes standing in for mutations. Despite the derivative nature of this beginning, the 'Cats joined the company of lasting heroes I mentioned when Alan Moore reimagined the team as frontier fighters carrying out a war forgotten on their homeworld.

However, since that highpoint, collected in the trade paperbacks HOMECOMING and GANG WAR, it has looked possible that the team would follow in the footsteps of YOUNGBLOOD, BRIGADE, WETWORKS et al. as yet another symptom of the superhero boom of the early '90's. The trading cards and the animated series came and went, and with superhero titles losing popularity, there was no obvious direction to take the book.

When Scott Lobdell and Travis Charest started up the series again there was no doubt that the quality was there in the book. Charest, who at this point is the definitve WILDCATS artist, draws gorgeously. And Lobdell pushed the already bizarre relationships between the team members in some genuinely unexpected directions. But Charest draws slowly, and Lobdell seemed to see this delay as a reason to use every issue to start a new storyline altogether.

So when DC announced that Joe Casey and Sean Phillips were going to take over the book and put it out monthly, it was clear that it could go one of two ways: either Casey and Phillips would see the value in Lobdell's and Charest's meanderings and get the story really rolling, or the new regimentation would pave over the slow developments in the book with a flood of standard-issue violence and breast-beating.

I am thus very pleased to say that if this first story-arc is indicative of what we can expect, Casey and Phillips are on their way to creating a classic. While they've given up Lobdell's practice of devoting each issue to a different character in the book, they've used the new focus to develop more fully the relationships that Lobdell had sketched.

The story-arc describes two crucial events that had been foreshadowed in earlier issues of WILDCATS, the showdown with the Kenyan, a long-lived collector of Kheran and Daemonite weaponry, and the ascension of Lord Emp as a Kheran High Lord. Both events ultimately occur in an utterly unanticipated fashion which nevertheless makes perfect sense of a series of enigmatic interactions between Emp and the Kenyan in the first two issues of the arc. While the ultimate resolution of the story reflects the past histories and psychology of the characters, there is still plenty of great violence in it, including a series of events in a Vegas casino that makes FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS look like a Cub Scout camp-out.

But the quality of the storytelling that really screams "classic" is the characterization. "Strong characterization," when applied to superhero books, tends to refer to making characters empathetic, someone whom the reader would like to be friends with.

This is decidedly not the case with the four heroes in this story-arc. Emp has a certain hard-earned wisdom but looks like a decaying rat, while Spartan has had most of what little personality he had removed to make room for more powerful weapons systems. The gay arms dealer Noir is funny, but a coward with no real virtues; when Grifter encounters him in issue #8 he interrupts Noir's attempt to molest a pizza delivery boy. But the most pathetic is Grifter himself, who is continually forced to confront the fact that even without a personality Spartan has more interpersonal skills than he'll ever possess.

In short, they're losers. Losers with a lot of power. And Casey has more fun with this set-up than anyone should be allowed to have. The team of Spartan, Noir and Grifter is particularly amusing, as Noir uses an extremely acid sense of humor to deal with the fact that he's being dragged around the world by two homocidal "heroes" with more firepower at their disposal than Eisenhower had at D-Day. Whether he's dressing Spartan in some particularly ridiculous clothes that he says he found "in Spartan's closet," or keeping at a distance from the homophobic Grifter by accusing him of latent tendencies, Noir is a decidedly witty character of a type that you won't be seeing in Superman anytime soon.

Phillips' artwork complements the story extremely well. Phillips has a heavy style of a sort that is popular in Vertigo and other more "mature" adventure comics, but still manages to capture the same sense of the characters that Charest brought to them with his much more delicate, almost photographic drawing. Given that Charest is still drawing the covers, the sense of a break is far more minimal than one would expect. In some respects the arrangement provides the best of both worlds insofar as Charest's drawing sometimes tends toward the static quality that afflicts the photorealism of Alex Ross; Phillips' more raw drawing is significantly more kinetic.

In short, the new WILDCATS creative team has done one good story-arc and shows every sign that it can do many more. As a book that offers the humor and violence of a classic superhero story in a decidedly unchildish form, WILDCATS looks set to join THE AUTHORITY and PLANETARY as an account of developments in a very entertaining Wildstorm Universe.

Recommended .

Pindaros is a regular contributor to PopImage.

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