LWIA v4 Chapter 1: WildC.A.T.s (Patreon)

Following straight from the previous segment.

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Among the people who wisely passed on involvement with Heroes Reborn was Alan Moore, who was offered Iron Man. This was always going to be a stretch—even if Moore’s issues with Marvel were never as personal as his feud with DC, he was well past working with the big two companies. But it was a fair shot on the part of Jim Lee, who as late as 2003 Moore was still describing as “a nice guy” who he “always liked,” and for whom Moore had been writing WildC.A.T.s since mid-1995. This, as the advertising breathlessly reiterated, marked Moore’s first ongoing series since Swamp Thing. But in a larger sense it marked a significant shift in Moore’s work at Image. His work at McFarlane’s studio had largely focused on spinoff characters, and even when he wrote a straight-up Spawn arc it was siloed on its own miniseries. The effect was to keep Moore slightly siloed within the larger Spawn line—a high profile sideshow distinct from McFarlane’s main attraction. Here, however, he was doing an extended run on on Jim Lee’s flagship book.

Born in Seoul before moving to the United States as a child, Lee was one of the generation of comics readers who saw their love of the genre reignited in the mid-80s by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. After a fight with his parents Lee postponed his plans to go to med school after Princeton in favor of spending a year trying to break into comics. After impressing Archie Goodwin at a convention he found work at Marvel, starting on Alpha Flight, Marvel’s collection of Canadian superheroes, before helping establish the secondary Punisher title The Punisher War Journal and filling in for Mark Silvestri on Uncanny X-Men, which he took over as regular penciller in 1990. By this time he’d honed his trademark style defined by a fine line that gave everything a kinetic sketchiness, and, propelled by the wild popularity of the X-Men line, he quickly became the top artist in the industry.

While Lee made his name on the X-Men books, WildC.A.T.s is not a straightforward X-Men pastiche in the way Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood was. Based on a pitch Lee had developed while trying to break into comics, it was an altogether more eclectic book, grabbing influences from across comics. There’s Lord Emp, a billionaire team leader in the style of Justice League’s Maxwell Lord, Grifter, a gunslinging mercenary akin to the Punisher with a mask rooted in Rob Liefeld’s design for Deadpool, Maul, a towering strongman whose intelligence decreased as his size increased just like the Hulk, and Zealot, a member of a group of female warriors with unapologetic debt to Wonder Woman. Like most Image titles, the writing was messy and ill-paced, with the core of the plot revolving around the centuries old secret war between the alien Kherubim, from whom most of the team’s powers derived, and the Daemonites, who, as their name suggests, were the bad guys, with the first arc centering on the admittedly phenomenal hook of the Daemonits corrupting Vice President Dan Quayle.

Lee had a restless streak, however, and quickly began bouncing among other projects. After nine issues co-written with his old friend Brandon Choi, he did a final four issue arc with his old X-Men collaborator Chris Claremont that introduced the Superman clone Mister Majestic before departing the book, with James Robinson taking over on writing and Travis Charest on art. That run culminated with an issue tying into the ten part Wildstorm Rising crossover, which ended with the bulk of the team seemingly perishing while trying to defuse an exploding Kherubim spaceship.

The effect of this was that when Alan Moore took over from Robinson with WildC.A.T.s #21 he was, for the first time, in the position of having a blank slate handed to him instead of having to kill a bunch of characters off himself, meaning that he could get right to the task of having Mr. Majestic and his daughter, an archeologist going by the name Savant, create a new team consisting of Condition Red, Grifter’s kid brother, Tao, a genetically engineered supergenius, and Ladytron, a violent cyborg named after a Roxy Music song, because Moore can never resist a Brian Eno reference.

More interesting than the team itself, however, is how Moore goes about introducing his new status quo. The issue moves back and forth between a sequence at a chintzy US Presidents themed restaurant in Chicago where the new team’s first op is unfolding and the days leading up to it in which the team is assembled. It’s an effective structure on several levels. For one, the cutting allows Moore to avoid having to introduce all of his characters in a series of consecutive recruitment scenes. Instead he structures the Chicago scenes so that characters are introduced there alongside their flashback recruitment scenes. So the first scene—a Chicago scene—sees a character the audience doesn’t recognize in a George Washington costume seating a guest at the restaurant. The second is set four days earlier and sees Savant recruiting Condition Red. The third then cuts back to the restaurant and establishes that the George Washington fellow is Condition Red working undercover, while also introducing Savant, dressed up as Jackie O. The issue continues in this basic fashion, such that everything moves towards the mission’s actual point, the recruitment of Ladytron, who the team expects to attack a drug deal going down in the restaurant.

This accomplishes several notable things. For one, it’s simply a hell of a lot more intricate than Image readers would have been accustomed to. Lee’s first issue of WildC.A.T.s engaged with some time jumping, but it far milder. More to the point, it was far less coherent—Moore goes to considerable length to hold the reader’s hand through the issue. Not only does every time jump have a nice handy date and timestamp, scenes typically include a brief caption summarizing what’s about to unfold—“Mr. Majestic looks for the perfect woman,” for instance, in a scene prior to the discussion of whether to recruit Ladytron. Moore also accomplishes the increase in formal complexity without a significant departure from Image’s house style, which Moore noted was characterized by “the fact that these artists prefer to have two or three panels a page, rather than six or nine. That changes the way I tell a story, and changes the nature of the story. You have to have a fairly high adrenaline level, a fairly constant flow of action-all that puts certain restraints on it.” For all its nonlinear structure, WildC.A.T.s kept to an average of just under 3.5 panels per page—in fact a decrease from the 4.5 that James Robinson’s last issue averaged. There’s a real effort being made here to balance Moore’s desire for smarter and more thoughtful comics with the expectations of Image readers.

Indeed, WildC.A.T.s #21 is notable to a great extent for just how much those existing Image readers are the primary audience. One might have expected Moore and Image to use his presence on the book as the occasion for a high-profile “great jumping on point” to attract new readers. But Moore’s script clearly assumes a reader familiar with not just WildC.A.T.s but the larger Wildstorm line—he makes no real effort to explain what happened to the old team, despite the fact that their apparent death happened not in the previous issue of WildC.A.T.s but in the Wildstorm Rising book—a book that WildC.A.T.s in fact outsold. Indeed, reflecting on his WildC.A.T.s run after the fact, Moore identified this as an error on his part, saying that “I was imagining that there was a whole bunch of WildC.A.T.s fans out there who really wanted to see these characters treated in a specific way,” and “trying to work out what the audience wanted, which is a terrible mistake and I don’t know what I was thinking.”

But for all that Moore was trying to pander to the Image audience, there were clear ways he was pushing against their expectations as well. There was, of course, his move towards mild formal complexity, but a more subtle point comes in the form of who among the new cast Moore highlights. The issue’s point of view character, for instance, featuring in virtually every scene, is Savant. She’s the one who actually heads up the recruitment effort for Mister Majestic, and so is the one who is most often reacting to new information and making decisions. She’s also a considerably more dynamic character than Mister Majestic, who spends the issue resisting her efforts to recruit people like Condition Red, who he describes as “some amoral little gutter rat.” And, most importantly, she’s clever and charming. Her opening scene is a conversation with Condition Red that takes place over six panels in which neither character actually appears, the art instead panning from the entrance of a building up through some stairs to a swimming pool, all massively splattered in blood. Savant remains cool in this conversation, pointing out that Condition Red is “in way over his head with cops, mobsters, just about everybody.” It’s a good scene that establishes her as competent and in control.

The other character to shine, meanwhile, is Ladytron. The alternating structure means that the whole issue builds towards her arrival at the restaurant, which takes place as she crashes a convertible through the wall, guns blazing, as she shouts “your money and your life, optimists!” She subsequently spends several pages kicking ass and delivering lines like “Okay! Anybody who doesn’t want this place redecorated in ‘hint of brains’ better chill out!” before she’s finally rendered unconscious by Tao, who explodes a bag of heroin near her head. It’s an absolute showcase for her, and makes sure to foreground the transgressive ultraviolence of her character, establishing her as a fun character in precisely the way the Image aesthetic demands. But this combination also has the effect of making the book’s female characters its most interesting ones—a distinct departure from that aesthetic.

The issue’s most interesting move, however, comes on its final page, when, after an issue of doing his usual wrecking ball establishment of a new status quo, Moore played the final card in his hand and revealed that the original WildC.A.T.s team had not, in fact, died in an exploding spaceship, but were alive and well in outer space. Indeed, contrary to the impression given by its first issue, Moore’s first arc on WildC.A.T.s would be primarily focused on this team, with the bulk of its issues split so that the original team got the first sixteen pages and the new team got eight pages in the back, the exception being issue #25, which was double-sized and gave a full length story to each of the two teams.

This surprise main plot begins on a comedic note, with Lord Emp smoking a celebratory cigar as they approach Khera and waxing poetic about “the utopia that Zealot and myself left eons ago” whilst Zealot desperately communicates in song with the planet, stammering as she finishes that “th-they’re giving us permission to approach and land. I-I must have gotten the words right.” Her teammate Voodoo inquires whether getting the words wrong would have been so bad, to which a furious Zealot replies, “Don’t be stupid, girl. They would have vaporized us!” But the underlying darkness of this bit—the sense that Khera has an astonishingly harsh culture—is quickly followed up on. As Lord Emp and Zealot—the only full Kherubim on the team—are whisked away to their estates, their “underlings” (as the officials greeting the ship rather ominously call the rest of the team) are given a genetic screening, after which Voodoo is quietly whisked away. The rest of the team proceeds to their hotel (the Coincidental Mansion—they’re instructed that “if two of you start humming the same tune or speaking the same sentence, then you’ve found it”), although not before seeing a protester pleading about how native Kherans “must have medicine and schools, just like the coldeyes have.” Voodoo, meanwhile, is dragged off to Containment Block Seven—a slum for Daemonite refugees—on the basis of her part-Daemonite DNA.

The arc spends its remaining time on the tarnished nature of this utopia, and it’s not subtle about it. The Daemonite slum is compared explicitly to the South African apartheid regime, the indigenous Kherans (the dominant population that Emp and Zealot belong to being settler-colonists) are described as being “stuck in overcrowded reservations,” and Coda, Zealot’s group of female warriors, are “like the Ku Klux Klan, but with better costumes.” As for the Kherubim/Daemonite war that had underpinned so much of WildC.A.T.s’ plot up to this point, it’s revealed that the war ended centuries ago with a Kherubim victory, and that the characters simply didn’t know this because Earth was too much of a far away backwater for the news to reach them. It’s a comprehensive deconstruction of the existing lore, but more to the point, it’s an angry deconstruction focused heavily on satirizing American imperialism and state propaganda. There are ways in which this marks the purest reaction to Watchmen and its fallout of Moore’s career—almost all of his other post-Watchmen superhero work follows in the tradition of 1963, either by being fundamentally a bit of a lark or by foregoing deconstruction in favor of a neoclassical embrace of the innocence of superheroes. But in trying to discern what it was Image readers might want, Moore seems to have settled on an extension of Watchmen’s most thematically aggressive instincts. Instead of simply having individual characters like Rorschach or the Comedian, Moore crafts an entire world that works according to the bleak logic underpinning those characters, with the bulk of heroes being either willing participants or hapless rubes in the face of it. The comics may be disposable hack jobs for a fast paycheck, but the fact remains that, more than anything else among his post-Watchmen work, they prefigure the position on superheroes that he would eventually arrive at in “What We Can Know about Thunderman.”

Inevitably the Khera arc ends with the scales falling from everyone’s eyes and the team decamping to return to Earth, where his backup arc has been detailing his new team’s formation and initial missions in the course of a new campaign, suggested by Tao, of “taking the offensive against supervillains.” Here too there’s an aggressive cynicism to proceedings—one issue sees Condition Red fatally shoot a cyborg in the course of a fight, while the next sees the WildC.A.T.s crashing the cyborg’s funeral, with the final panel showing the victorious team standing over his sobbing widow. By the arc’s end, this sort of reckless and sociopathic aggression has backfired on the team in a big way, with a supervillain gang war on the brink of breaking out. Before Moore could deal with the implications of this, however, he had a crossover to deal with.

This was entitled Fire from Heaven—a twenty part storyline that wound through all of the Wildstorm books alongside three bespoke books created for the event, the main one of which was written by Moore. And there were, by this point, a decent number of Wildstorm titles. Lee had proven to have a restless streak, and after getting WildC.A.T.s established, he moved on to creating new titles. Some of these, like Deathblow (a special-ops military type) and Gen13 (a teen superheroes book) he drew early issues of, but he was less involved in others. He co-wrote the early issues of Stormwatch (a special ops team rivaling the WildC.A.T.s) with Brandon Choi, and in the course of doing so co-created a character called Backlash who was spun into his own book. A sixth title, Wetworks, had no real involvement by Lee at all, instead being created by Whilce Portacio, who had intended the book as a launch title before stepping back as one of Image’s cofounders due to a family illness. But the result was a fairly hefty publishing line, and one that had grown quite quickly.

This meant that a big crossover involved quite a lot of plot threads. This posed a problem, given that the basic idea of a crossover is that it should attract more readers. But with six books worth of characters, few of whom were especially well established, Fire from Heaven ended up being quite thorny and inhospitable to new readers. The plot splits its focus between events on the island nation of Gamorra, ruled by a despot named Kaizen Gamorra who’s obsessed with developing his own superheroes, and the impending arrival of Damocles, a villain from another universe. These plots intersected only hazily, however, resulting in a deeply unsatisfying pace for the event, which instead of coming to a straightforward climax instead does two separate big confrontations back to back.

On top of that, Image’s scheduling problems quickly reared their heads. Nominally the crossover was supposed to take place over two months. Instead it spanned four, with a monthlong gap between Chapter 14, the end of the main stretch, which came out on June 19th, and the three books comprising the Finale, all of which came out on July 31st, more than four months after the crossover began. One of the books responsible for this delay was the final issue of the main Fire from Heaven book, which saw Jim Lee take up art chores so that it could be promoted as the first pairing of him and Alan Moore. The result was a flop of a crossover that quickly found itself being mocked in the pages of Wizard for just how uncollectible it proved to be.

Moore, for his part, was not thrilled with what he referred to at the time as “this fairly inane WildStorm crossover” despite the fact that he was writing both the main book and the two WildC.A.T.s tie-ins. In his account, he only agreed to write it on the condition that they’d provide him “a list of what you want it to do and leave everything else to me,” only to recieve “the complete plot for the crossover, almost page by page. It didn’t work, they totally fucked it up, they’ve had to re-write the ending about six times because it didn’t work.” It’s perhaps unsurprising, then that the two actual Fire From Heaven issues mark some of the most half-assed work of Moore’s career, particularly the second one, which sees him writing sparkling dialogue like having a character proclaim that the moon “may be a cold, lifeless chunk of rock. But it’s our cold, lifeless chunk of rock. Let’s take it back.”

Moore’s two actual WildC.A.T.s issues in the crossover have a somewhat easier time of it. His first pulls double duty as the issue in which the two WildC.A.T.s teams actually meet each other, which takes up about half the issue. The two teams then split, with the old team going to deal with the crossover while his new team stays to sort out the impending gang war, and the issue then splits its attention between the two teams so that the actual crossover portion of the issue is effectively confined to its final seven pages. Unfortunately this luck doesn’t hold for his second issue, which is almost entirely crossover nonsense, although he still puts more effort into it than he does in Fire From Heaven #2.

An interesting footnote to the crossover comes in a two-part miniseries created for it called Sword of Damocles, which has the unenviable task of trying to flesh out Damocles’s henchman, who is of course named Sword. But it has the luck of being written by Warren Ellis, a tedious sex pest who was in many ways the first of the second generation British invasion writers. By this point he was only a few years into his career, so far having mostly written d-list Marvel titles after getting started with a serial called Lazarus Churchyard written for the dying remains of the British industry, and these two issues marked his first work for Image. But he threw himself into the task, doing all that he could to give Sword a distinctive narrative voice and to build him up as a threat. The result doesn’t rise to the level of quality—Fire From Heaven is ultimately too much of a mess for quality to be a plausible outcome—but it’s a night and day improvement compared to the other writers Lee is using in the crossover, and demonstrates that Ellis is both a skilled writer and one who will make the most of even a mediocre opportunity. He is, in other words, clearly a writer with ambition, and it wouldn’t be long before he started to fulfill them.

Moore stuck around for four more issues of WildC.A.T.s after Fire from Heaven—enough to tie up his supervillain gang war plot, which turns out to have all been a nefarious manipulation on the part of Tao, who was a villain all along whose intelligence was matched by a superhuman persuasiveness. His final issue makes sure to put things back the way he found them, sidelining the new team and restoring the WildC.A.T.s to more or less their original lineup, although he’s still far cleverer than he needs to be with it, structuring it by cutting back and forth between the climax of the gang war and a funeral for an unknown member of the WildC.A.T.s, using people’s arrival at the funeral to gradually remove them as suspects for who died. In the end, though, it’s revealed that the team is just burying Tao, and Moore departs his grand return to ongoing superhero comics with no real impact or consequence to speak of.