Having successfully relaunched their main superhero titles under the Rebirth banner as well as their Hanna-Barbera line and their new indie imprint Young Animal, DC has turned its attention to their old Wildstorm label which is given a makeover by Warren Ellis in The Wild Storm. And, disappointingly, it’s pants!
I’m not gonna pretend I was a huge Wildstorm fanboy but they published some of the most undeniably original and inventive comics of its day and I enjoyed a number of their titles like Brian K Vaughan/Tony Harris’s Ex Machina and Sam Kieth’s The Maxx. Most significantly for me as a Warren Ellis fan, Wildstorm was a playground for Ellis where he produced some of the comics that made me a devoted fan of his. Among them was the enormously entertaining and hyper-violent action thriller Red (later adapted into two watered-down, unmemorable Bruce Willis movies) and the imaginative galactic X-Files-esque series, Planetary.
My favourite Ellis/Wildstorm title though was The Authority. At a time when teenage me was jaded with mainstream superhero comics, along came this appealingly subversive, cynical, and very adult series that effortlessly held my interest and re-energised the genre. You could semi-accurately summarise the cast as a piss-take of the Justice League but they were better than that. Jenny Sparks, the Spirit of the Age, Angie the Engineer, Jack Hawksmoor, Midnighter and Apollo – they were a colourful, imaginative bunch who went on amazing intergalactic adventures on their giant living alien ship, leaping through portal-doors across mind-bending space (The Bleed) to save the world again and again.
So I was delighted to hear not only was Wildstorm getting relaunched but its finest writer was at the helm. How could this not be good? Well. This is how. The Wild Storm, Volume 1 is about dreary businessmen from rival tech firms stealing each other’s corporate secrets. What. The. Shit? Ellis couldn’t have conceived of a more dull premise. It reads nothing like any Wildstorm book!
Maybe it’s not fair to compare The Wild Storm to The Authority but the most prominent characters here are former Authority characters. Angie the Engineer (cosplaying as Nemesis the Warlock for some reason) is basically the main character who’s stolen tech to become a living robot. Why? To what end? What’s her arc? Pass, pass and pass. RUBBISH. Bendix appears in some scenes, growling like a grumpy human bear to no effect. Jenny Sparks (in name only) appears and doesn’t do anything. Nobody’s favourite character, Grifter (of the WildCATS), shoots some faceless goons. Oh my god… really?
This was an immensely boring read. Shite characters, rambling, incoherent, utterly crap pseudo-storyline, flat dialogue, unmemorable scene after unmemorable scene, no clear direction or any vision - I can’t believe this is what Ellis came up with for the relaunch. The Wildstorm books I read, particularly The Authority ones, were exciting; The Wild Storm, Volume 1 is the polar opposite. I haven’t read any of those books in years so I don’t know if they hold up but I’d still highly rec any of the old Wildstorm books over this grey, bland garbage.
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