Broken Frontier

Armageddon has come to pass. The world is a desolate wasteland populated with post humans who thrive on the flesh of the more ordinary kind of human. In this chaos, the survivors must turn to the WildC.A.T.s.

During the dark days, when I did not read comics, that everyone else calls the 90s, there was a comic that spawned action figures and an animated television series. The X-Men, you say. NO. Spawn, you say. NO. I’m talking about Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.s. I missed all that excitement. Poor me.

Just a little while ago, there was a WildC.A.T.s book that never got past its first issue, maybe enough people didn’t vote for it. Maybe, the writer got assigned too many tasks. Who knows? A little while after that I trudged through a volume entitled The Complete WildC.A.T.s by Alan Moore. Not a one of those comics made any sense to me. All I really got was that they were a X-Men rip off that had started at Image and was now published by DC.

Here there is an intriguing concept backing them up. Instead of just rehashing old X-Men ideas, the world has come to an end and the WildC.A.T.s are the last hope for humanity. It is kind of cool given the ruthlessness of members like Grifter and Zealot, that they are the saviors because other meta-beings are scarier.

Hopefully, this is the beginning of the relaunch of the WildStorm Universe which has been mishandled, rebooted, and in a constant state of destruction for over three years. Hopefully, we will see a second issue and hopefully I can get a new ongoing Authority and maybe that last issue of Planetary. The problem is there has been promise aplenty from WildStorm... is there any good will left from the fans?

I hope so, because this is the first time that I have grasped what was going on with this particular character set. Gage has a way of writing this whole universe with clarity. It has to be a passion for the characters, because the ability shown here and that he displayed on Stormwatch PHD is the kind of love that we rarely see, unless it is Rucka and Brubaker writing something like Gotham Central. It seems to be a labor of love and the writing is lifted beyond the common superhero book and becomes about characters in impossible situations. I guess what I am trying to say is that this issue shows promise, I hope it just isn’t too late.

Googe is one of my favorites. Welcome to Tranquility is one of those books that I dearly miss and while this book is just a tad bit more mainstream in its lines, take a close look at Grifter, that playfulness is there. He is a quirky penciller and his style is identifiable even in this more muted look. Strachan is the perfect colorist for Googe. She takes the colors and adds a palette and rendering that not only complements the lines but accentuates it. This is why Dave Stewart is so lauded, when a colorist like this is on a book, it just makes the art look better. It pops!

Please don’t disappoint us again, WildStorm. I am not sure how much the fans can take. If this book can continue and be this good, the Universe might just make it after all.