Hey, We're Still Publishing Comics Over Here!

As summer begins its inexorable roar through a comic buyer's wallet, there is a little comic on the way, a mash-up mini-series event piloted by a legendary comics writer, full of all your favorite spandex-clad warriors—and "nothing will ever be the same." But it's not Grant Morrison's Final Crisis or Brian Bendis' Secret Invasion. It's Keith Giffen's Dreamwar.

The Wildstorm universe—did Jim Lee ever expect it to last this long? Born out of the days when a star-studded group of artists got together to start taking over the ownership and control of the super-hero characters they were drawing, the original line-up of Image is now the punch-line to what happens when writing is left behind as the ugly step-sister in comics creation. Of them all, the only one that's still shepherded by the original creator is Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon. The rest of them-Spawn, Wildcats, Youngblood and Shadowhawk turned into a breeding ground for artists and writers that have since gone on to the arms of DC & Marvel. Warren Ellis, Brian Michael Bendis, Bryan Hitch, Mark Millar & Frank Quitely did some time on the creations of Lee & McFarlane, but they jumped ship long ago. Wildstorm jumped itself—leaving Image behind to try their hand on their own, eventually settling under the shutters of DC as an odd publishing imprint of super-heroes, licensed horror movie titles, and mildly experimental Vertigo-lite. They aren't Impact Comics, they aren't Malibu—but it's been so long since Wildstorm had any sort of definite mission statement that it's tough to say what they're supposed to be. One thing they aren't is the home of many original characters—all of their "stars" are homages or pastiches of various existing super-hero properties, with some form of a twist. There's the gay superman, the gay Batman, a Wolverine with a gun and a red handkerchief, a Japanese Iron Man—and of course, a Buddhist Hawkgirl. (Side question: Which of the Four Noble Truths is the one about killing people with feet talons?)

For brief moments in its history, some of the Wildstorm universe's output found success. Due mostly to the low sales they experienced, the editorial control was mild enough to allow writers to do whatever they pleased—and while for most of their history "whatever they pleased" was to write hackneyed imitations of DC & Marvel in hopes of finding higher profile gigs, there were times when the imagination was there. Joe Casey's Wildcats 3.0 and the widescreen days of the Authority are two examples of moments when writers and artists looked at the Wildstorm universe as the ultimate playground to experiment with what they thought super-hero comics could behave like. No one was ever going to allow this sort of stuff to be done with Spider-Man and Green Lantern, but who was going to stop it here? In the Authority's case, the work was exactly what comics buyers were looking for, but none of the success was lasting. When Ellis and Millar left for the opportunity to work for higher-profile corporations and the freedom of complete creative control, that audience went with them. Joe Casey found himself to be a writer with a vocal and obsessive fanbase, just not one large enough for Wildcats or the Intimates to survive. Meanwhile, a fan favorite like Ed Brubaker couldn't even keep the Authority alive, and that's when the long train of the Wildstorm revamps and events began. First there was the Coup d'état—a story that posited fascist control by way of super-heroes that began, but never finished. Then there was the Worldstorm event, when DC couldn't figure out what to do with their Captain Atom character, but didn't want to kill him. He was thrown into the low-selling Wildstorm super-hero comics, and everything was supposed to change—Jim Lee, Grant Morrison, Gene Ha, Gail Simone, Brian Azzarello, Garth Ennis and Chris Sprouse were brought in and given license to re-create, re-vamp and re-tell stories, from the ground up. A bunch of first issues were released—and then, nothing. Some of the series were able to finish their storylines, like Simone's Tranquility and Christos Gage's Stormwatch PHD, while others like Morrison's Wildcats haven't been heard from since.

Then, as if none of that had happened, another dip in the world of the Midnighter and Apollo shows up in the form of low-selling mini-series, all of which are laced with names like Armageddon, Prime, Ragnorak, what have you. This past week saw, with the little hubbub that's available outside of the advertising budget for Final Crisis and Secret Invasion, Keith Giffen showing up with Dreamwar, a mini-series where the big tier of DC characters (the Justice League and the Teen Titans) arrived among the Wildstorm characters to…well, fight, apparently.

If you haven't started to wonder what the hell is going on, if there's anyone with any idea of where this publishing line is going, then you've got more faith than…oh, a Skrull, to keep this topical.

Here's the thing though—what does all this sound most like? What it sounds like to this jaded comic reader is a super-hero comic without long-range planning. It sounds, and they read, like comic books that are being written and illustrated with little to no editorial control whatsoever, that don't have anything figured out for the next six months. If you boil that down all the way, then it sounds like Wildstorm has decided to ditch being the serialization of future trade paperbacks that we see at DC & Marvel, and are instead embracing the old school Stan Lee/Bob Haney method: just get something out there, get it out there every month, stay low and keep your feet moving. While they've yet to produce anything on par with the "best this industry has to offer", they've turned into something that could be exciting again: a place that may look a lot like the DC universe, but a place where all the rules that are in place to prevent them from going off the rails completely have been relinquished. While Dreamwar isn't far enough along to be anything special, and it's unlikely that the next Wildcats mini-series will be written by Art Spiegelman, the truth is that, for Wildstorm, there is absolutely no way to predict what is going to happen next. For better or worse, that unpredictability might be worth looking into.