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October 12, 2004
Subway Reading
If you ever find yourself on the F Train from Brooklyn to Manhattan in the morning, or going in the opposite direction during the evening rush hour, look for a skinny, bespectacled (and strikingly handsome, I may add) guy with close-cropped hair and his nose buried in a comic book. That would be me! I have 40 minutes each way to kill, and that's my primary comic-reading time.
Since the last 2 weeks were crummy as far as new comics to buy, I have had to break into my emergency supply of unread TPBs. My selection for yesterday & today was...
Wildcats Version 3.0: Brand Building
written by Joe Casey, art by Dustin Nguyen & Richard Friend
This trade reprints Wildcats 3.0 #1-6, from 2002. I did not read these books when they were orginially released, because of a deeply-held bias against all the early 90s Image characters & books. While I was certainly as guilty as the next guy of being swept up by the hype and buying a lot of these titles when they first came out, it did not take long for me to react against the insipid stories and gratuitous art that were being pumped out in order to satisfy speculators and drooling fanboys. (I recently auctioned my embarassingly large stack of Image books on eBay, containing many of the #1's that were so sought after 10 or 12 years ago, for roughly 15 cents each.)
So I went into this book with a bit of skepticism. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my concerns were somewhat unfounded. Joe Casey has polished this turd to within an inch of its life, and the results are not altogether unsatisfying. He has recast Jack Marlowe, the formerly inane superhero known as Spartan, as the CEO of the Halo corporation. His vaguley described altruistic ambitions, however, separate him from his greedy corporate peers. His first big move is to invent and sell batteries that never run out of power.
(Now, to me, this doesn't seem like the most sustainable business idea in the world. By definition you are shrinking your own market with every battery you sell. If you carry it out to its logical conclusion, one day every CD player, flashlight, automobile, cell phone, etc. in the world will be powered by a battery that neevr needs to be replaced. At that point, why would anybody need to buy a new Halo battery? But to be fair, Casey might well address this in later issues that are not collected in this trade.)
So far, so good. The superhero as world-reshaper idea has been done to death in the last 10 to 20 years, most notably by "The Authority." Its roots can of course be traced back to the grandpappy of every supposedly deconstrucitionist superhero book, Alan Moore's Watchmen. Still, I give Casey a few points for originality, because he is the first that I can think of to use the multinational brand-conscious corporate culture as his sandbox.
Now if this book were simply a tale of boardroom intrigue, it probably never would have made it to the comic racks. That's where Jack Cole, AKA The Grifter, comes in. In the Wildcats, he was the blatant Wolverine to Spartan's Cyclops. He fills the same role in this book, right down to the bushy sideburns. His job in the Halo corporation is "Fixer," that is to say, he travels the world shooting people and blowing things up on behalf of Cole and the corporation. His other jobs seems to be include glowering, smoking, and supplying predictable, melodramatic dialogue.
Tha art, by Dustin Nguyen, is very satisfying. His recent run on Batman seemd a bit more confident and stylized, which I prefer to the style on display in this book. In Wildcats 3.0, I see much more influence of the dreaded Image house style. A lot of that can probably be blamed on the inking however. Can somebody please give these guys a thicker brush?
Ultimately this book offers some very cool moments and art, but they are tempered by some cringe-worthy dialogue and plot developments. A notable improvement over Jim Lee's early 90s WildCATS, that's for sure. But it needed to take another few big steps up in maturity and subtlety before it could stand up to current Wildstorm titles such as Sleeper and Ex Machina. I can see why it was cancelled a few months ago along with its fellow 90s Image descendant, Stormwatch: Team Achilles.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at October 12, 2004 10:51 AM