Welcome to a brand new column which we have lovingly titled Longbox Diving. If there is a theme here at Multiversity, it is the repeated recommendation and reviewal of comics past moreso than comics current. While we report news regularly, with articles like Off The Cape, Friday Recommendation, and Crossed-Out Crossovers we find ourselves looking into the past at books of yesteryear.
What makes Longbox Diving different from the other articles, however, is the selection process is a little bit different. The theme of this article is that myself and co-writer Joshua Mocle will week after week pull a title out of our respective longboxes that we have not had an encounter with in some time for whatever reason. It could be a title never collected in trade, one easily forgotten, or even something just recently collected – but the emphasis here is that we owned the comic, we forgot we owned the comic for whatever reason, and now we are revisiting it.
And with that in mind, today I look at Joe Casey’s unfortunately cancelled series: Wildcats 3.0.
I’m not a WildCATs fan at all. Not really, anyway. I understand it’s importance to the medium as well as Jim Lee’s career, but I was never a WildStorm reader as a kid (and obviously can’t be now). I only ever really liked the Authority, because- well, they’re the Authority! Who in their right mind doesn’t like the Authority? So for all their years of existence and cancellations and crossovers and relaunches and reboots, I never gravitated to the WildCATs except for once: with Wildcats 3.0.
To set the stage about how this book came about: in 2001, WildStorm launched a new imprint entitled Eye Of The Storm (for timely clarification: in 2001, I was mainly only reading comics with Venom and trying to be cool around girls, with little to no success). The idea behind the imprint was to utilize the classic characters, introduce new ones, and do it all under a “mature readers” line so as to allow these otherwise run-of-the-mill superhero books to push some boundaries and get a fresh breath of life put in. Eye of the Storm saw talented creators bringing ideas to the line, which included quite a few original works from Warren Ellis (such as Planetary), Kurt Busiek’s Astro City coming over from Image, and Ed Brubaker’s critically acclaimed and recently recollected Sleeper and Point Blank (which, as a note, spun out of WildCATs). And of course, right at the heart of the imprint was a rebootlaunched title of the book that put the Wild in WildStorm.
I myself came to Wildcats 3.0 years after the fact due to my perusal of comics I had missed when I was younger, and while following Ed Brubaker’s pre-Captain America career I ended up in the Eye of the Storm imprint reading about the adventures of some guy named Tao. Tao’s past as T.A.O. led me further along the line to the Coup D’Etat crossover, and subsequently, the aforementioned Wildcats 3.0. While I had preconceived notions about WildCATs due to my few experiences with them in the past and all the images I could see, Wildcats 3.0 was a title that looked more unique right from the cover, and thus my interest was born. The title took what had always seemed like an overdone idea to me: more muscley superheroes smashing stuff up on a cosmic scale – I’ll just stick to the muscles I know and like already. This was a book born of a ’90s mentality, and given that I came to WildCATs post-2000, I can’t say I was very interested.
But not only did this title turn out to be one that completely reinvigorated it’s purpose, but essentially reinvented the whole idea behind the team. Forget all that continuity and work done by previous creators over past volumes! More than half the cast went missing from the title and off to other places, and only two of the familiar WildCATs characters survived – Spartan and Grifter (with Zealot and Ladytron having roles later). It was essentially the perfect jumping on point for someone like me who was not going to track down a mileu of continuity crammed storylines.
Continued belowNot only was it accessible, however, but it was, is and forever will be just flat out brilliant. This book had little to do with space-faring adventures and time-travel wonkiness, but instead featured Spartan, now using the moniker Jack Marlowe, forming the Halo corporation to save the world with Grifter and newcomer Agent Wax at his side. Instead of having Spartan run around in a fancy costume blasting people with his superhuman android abilities, Jack Marlowe remained a cool and collected character whose only goal was simply to protect and save the world by using one of the oldest forms of societal infiltration to do so. This was a superhero book like no other, because its superheroes – while acknowledging the greater world around them – were never actually superheroes. This was a not-so-subtle take on the ideas of Company Men, who they are, what they do, and inevitably how they control our lives. The book handled superheroics on a more personal level, focusing on the complicated lives of these characters without ever featuring a legitimate supervillain or Big Bad. Sure, the gang went on adventures, and there was some violence and gunfire and physical conflict, but while other famous superhero books featured one hero punching another villain, Wildcats evolved.
What it amounted to is a simple statement from me about the book: in 2001, Joe Casey was taking apart heroes and putting them back together in a form and fashion that most writers are just attempting to do so now.
Casey was not shy at any point in the series from addressing the issues he felt relevant. The book was an obvious stab at the entire corporate world that we live in, with Spartan/Marlowe using the industry as a tool for change, only to be met with aggressive retaliation from other companies and the US government. Marlowe was reduced to a simple character who simply wanted to better humanity and avoid violence at all cost, and despite the revolutionary changes he brought on, other corporations reacted with violence. It was a rather vicious critique not only to the behavior of big business, but also to the mindset of the average person and the idea of brand loyalty. The human race was painted as simple-minded consumers who would rather grab a quick fix product and be satiated, and Marlowe understood this. The lines were rather clearly drawn here: you are either with Marlowe’s epic corporate take-over, or you aren’t. It was vicious, it was all deliberate, yet it still felt poignant and relevant and, to an extent, it’s kind of like Casey predicted the entire Apple revolution that was yet to fully arrive.
Of course, the book wasn’t just about corporate adventures, government corruption and Jack Marlowe being cold, stern and efficient. Casey did slowly bring back regular Wildcats continuity into the book and addressed loose threads from previous volumes. Grifter led a battle against Coda, and even touched lightly into the Coup d’Etat event with the Authority. It didn’t completely remove itself from the previous universe of the WildCATs, it just didn’t feel the need to force itself to replay the same storybeats. After the first few, almost every issue told a story that could stand on it’s own plus a cliffhanger. It was a completely fresh way to write a comic that reading now seems average to how people read comics, but reading in 2001 definitely breaks the mold.
WildStorm has always had an obvious stigma to some of it’s more well known content, and Casey showed how these characters who were essentially known for their muscle-laden adventures could be used for other purposes. Superheroes didn’t have to be superheroes all the time, and it was such a crazy idea. Completely abandoning the capes and tights and putting on a suit like the rest of us, just flashier? It was a completely reckless abandon of the never discussed superhero code that required underwear on the outside and a big evil villain to throw punches at. Wildcats integrated themselves into our world, in a land of corporate espionage and cut-throat office politics that felt more familiar. It was more like the sort of thing you might see on TV or in the movies, except it was in a comic book. As someone who had spent so much of their young adult reading career in comics focusing on high-powered superhero adventures, to see the dichotomy of the team dynamic broken down and reformed in this fashion in what was supposed to be a “mainstream superhero continuity-bound title with direct relation to other titles on the market” – well, I was shocked. And thrilled. And I ate it up like ice cream.
Continued belowEven reading it now (this past weekend, to be specific) shows that the book hasn’t lost its value. Casey’s writing in it is incredibly sharp, and borderline prophetic. The familiar cynical style with a complete “no fucks given ever” attitude that readers are used to from Casey today in books like Butcher Baker is certainly present here, albeit in some cases to a lesser extent. This is less Casey ripping apart the superhero genre completely and more him dismantling and rebuilding it to suit a better purpose and tell a better story. And, of course, it works. This is a book that feels like it could come out today, and hopefully would meet a much more open audience.
On top of that, the art department features Dustin Nguyen on art for the majority of the run in an almost completely different style than what we’re used to today. Nguyen’s artwork today is much sharper, with more jagged lines that tone the characters in an edgier fashion. While his cover work remains familiar, the interior artwork is closer to Eduardo Risso on 100 Bullets than Nguyen’s work on a Batman book (take your pick of which). Purely on the knowledge of the work Nguyen put out later in his career, it’s rather intriguing to see his interiors here, especially now that it can be compared to a title like 100 Bullets. It’s much more open and playful compared to something like Streets of Gotham or Detective Comics, but yet not afraid to break things apart when required. And of course he fits a great attention to miniscule detail into the panels, which help bring the universe of the book to life. He is later replced by other guest artists such as Duncan Rouleau and Sean Philips, but even then they simply seek to mimic his initial work.
I don’t think it will be a huge surprise to anyone here, but the title didn’t sell well, to the point that the full series was only collected recently (previously only two volumes had ever been collected in trade). At least, not what DC or WildStorm had wanted the titles to sell, despite widespread critical acclaim. This has always been WildStorm’s main issue: grand ideas, but not grand sales. So Wildcats, along with other titles on the line, were cancelled before they could reach their proper conclusions (depending how you look at and define those sort of things). Joe Casey had originally planned a 40 issue run on the relaunch in addition to 20+ issues he had written for volume 2 and a few one-shots here or there, yet now he was stuck with 24 issues and an overflowing handful of subplots awaiting resolution. However, despite that obstacle, Casey did manage to bring the series as full circle as possible, including a wink and a nod to the early ending, even remarking in the comic that it was all a bit anti-climactic. That’s sort of the unfortunate nature of the beast, though.
However, in a “to cut a long story short” sort of way, the reason Wildcats 3.0 is relevant today, if at all, is simply allowing a lense to look at the impending relaunch from DC (which is, truthfully, the reason I decided to write about this series and not the originally planned/discussed book, which will be used later). Wildcats 3.0 was and is pretty much a prime shining example of the reboot mentality and the lack of light at the end of the tunnel. The book was designed to be entirely accessible to the characters and allow a door to enter not only the universe but also hopefully spark interest in what came before, and all is inherently true: a new Wildcats reader was born, and it did create interest in me to explore other elements of the WildCATs. However, that ultimately didn’t save the book. Critical acclaim is one thing, but the casual reader does not have the same attention span as the passionate ones, and sales have proven that. While Wildcats 3.0 remains rather timeless in content, it – and in fact, most of WildStorm in general – is a pretty painful history lesson in “Why Reboots Aren’t That Great An Option.”
Whether or not DC’s relaunch will suffer the same fate as the Eye of the Storm did is yet to be seen, but given the history of the title, I would say start supporting Grifter now if you’re interested at all in his ongoing adventures. That and Stormwatch have the odds against it already from history alone.
