Wildcats #22
Casey/Phillips
Wildstorm/DC
$2.50
FEB010450
I'm about to date both myself, and my tastes in comics, here.
One of the first times I can remember starting to realize that the comics
world was bigger than Marvel or DC came when those bunch of wacky guys
known as the Image Seven gave a great big middle-finger-in-the-air to
Marvel and went off to start their own company. I'd been reading comics
for a very short while, and had started to pick up things like Comics
Scene in an attempt to find out what lay beyond the realms of the
Big Two. It was in the pages of that magazine that I first read about
Jim Lee's big idea for a creator-owned book, WildC.A.T.S.
Didn't take more than a cursory glance at the preview art in that article
to figure out that this was just about as standard a superhero team
as you could get. Lantern-jawed hero-type? Check. Oversized strong guy?
Check. Sexy, "strong" female character written as the opposite
of a damsel-in-distress? Check. Guy with big swords? Check. Ferocious
loner? Check. To say that I was under-whelmed by the first offerings
from Image would be charitable.
(Though that Cyberforce book looked interesting. *cough*)
Thus, for virtually the entire duration of its run, WildC.A.T.S.
sailed below my personal radar. Then, a while back, I read about how
it was coming back in a second volume, written by Scott Lobdell and
pencilled by Travis Charest. "Hmmm," I said to myself, "this
was that book I passed up a long time ago. Doesn't quite look the same,
now." And it didn't. Lobdell was pushing the book as a very different
kind of superhero fare. Rather than engage in costumed shenanigans and
villain-of-the-month adventures, the new and improved Wildcats was to
be an action movie which happened to have super-powered people in it.
However, Lobdell and Charest soon departed from the title after a few
pretty but tepid issues, and I was ready to give up on what had seemed
a promising concept, when in came Joe Casey and Sean Phillips. Suddenly,
I was hooked.
A little more than a year later, I'm still hooked. Casey seems to understand
what Lobdell was trying to do better than Lobdell himself did, and the
book shows it. Gone are the costumes and the code names; gone are the
supervillains, interminable fight scenes, and flashy splash pages. The
Wildcats of today is a tighter, more interesting book that focuses
more on characters living their lives than it does on their banding
together to confront the menace of the month.
"Unbearable Likeness" focuses on Cole Cash, who's still trying
to deal with the loss of his ex-girlfriend, by hooking up with every
woman resembling her he can find. Then Zealot, the ex in question, turns
up looking for him, and their reunion turns into a gunfight that'd make
John Woo proud. But while the fight scene is spectacular, it's the kiss
at the end of it that's even more interesting, suggesting that Cash
can't function happily unless he's on a constant adrenaline high. The
women he pursued couldn't offer him the element of danger that being
with Zealot does, and Cash needs that rush more than peace and quiet.
There are other things going on besides How Cole Got His Mojo Back,
though most of them are followups to plot threads from the "Serial
Boxes" arc. This is a quick, brutal tale of sex and violence, and
dangling plot lines only get in the way: Thus, Casey wisely relegates
them to brief interludes and even briefer hints of things to come.
The spectacle is what we're most concerned with here, and Sean Phillips
doesn't disappoint. Using page layouts set off by solid black panel
borders and a complete absence of negative space, Phillips makes every
panel into a storyboard for the action movie unfolding in front of us.
No wasted poses, no messy layouts-- a complete rejection of the style
the book's first incarnation was known for. Instead, what we get is
a well-choreographed, dialogue-free fight scene, straight from a Hong
Kong gun movie. It's the book's strongest selling point: Look, ma! No
spandex, just ACTION!
Of course, Wildcats isn't perfect. No matter how different in
style or approach it may be, it still labors under the weight of continuity.
Zealot is never identified by name, and though readers familiar with
the book's history will likely place her, there's no easy in for a first
time reader. It's not crucial to the story (pretty much anyone will
figure out she's Cole's ex in a few seconds), but it can be frustrating.
What Casey does right is that he assumes you will figure that out. Just
watch for a while, he says - you'll catch up. And he's right. It's that
assumption of intelligence, that lack of condescension, that makes Wildcats
a smarter kind of superhero book, and one of the brighter spots
in a genre long past its prime.
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Wildcats is available at finer retailers everywhere
with the order code of FEB10450. A finer finer retailer in your area
may be located at
www.the-master-list.com
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