Perhaps one of the single greatest victims of the New 52 reshuffle was the Wildstorm universe. A setting which can best be summed up as "Rob Liefeld's 90s but with better art and less stupidity", it sought to give the ideas of their era a little more consideration. This led to StormWatch becoming a paramilitary police procedural comic over an X-Men knock-off, led to The Authority and introduced the only arsehole Superman character I consider to be well executed: Majestic. Wildstorm ended with a bang, and closed out most of its stories, but the attempt to integrate its elements into the DC universe left much to be desired. One book was canceled after another, so before long it was entirely forgotten.
So, with the rebranding, we now have The Wild Storm, an entirely detached and new take on the older universe. With the slate wiped clean, and one of the old setting's most celebrated writers at the helm, you would expect things to go swimmingly, right? Well, they sort of do. Somewhat. It's a bit complicated.
The Synopsis
The world of The Wild Storm is one of the secret societies and cabals. Less Justice League and more X-Files with a hint of Ghost in the Shell, the world is run by a shadowy organisation known as I.O. which has long been held in an uneasy truce with the offworld nation of Skywatch and the mysterious Halo corporation. While few are happy with the deal, most grin and bear it for the sake of going about their business unimpeded, until a botched assassination attempt brings several secrets to light.
Jacob Marlowe, CEO of Halo, is almost assassinated by a man who can nullify his inhuman abilities and is cast out of a skyscraper window. As he is about to fall to his death, he is caught by a mysterious woman named Angela Spica, who metamorphoses battle armour about her body. This one act by Spica has opened a door which can never be closed, and she will not like what she finds on the other side...
The Good
Let's get the obvious out of the way first: This isn't the original Wildstorm universe. Many of the more colorfully elaborate elements are gone, in favour of a much more cynical and almost dour tone at points. However, this belies how the book has handled the reinterpretation of past story ideas. As has been said on this blog before, a reboot should be used as a chance to take the same building blocks and re-arrange them. You should start with the same essential characters, ideas and identities, but add new twists to justify this revamp. If you're left pillaging from old stories, you're wasting the entire reason to reboot the thing in the first place. This isn't the case here, as The Wild Storm keeps just enough original elements to retain its identity, but frequently puts a completely new spin on them.
More than a few personalities are identical to their past selves - with Marlowe, Grifter and Bendix being the obvious examples - but many others have changed. A few have even switched genders, but you can see the core of what they originally might have been. In the case of many - especially Angela Spica - you can clearly see that she's the same person, but followed a much bleaker and more unstable path than her predecessor. However, rather than using this for darknesses' sake, the story instead helps to establish her as the focal point. It's also a testament to Ellis' skills that he expertly sidestepped so many of the typical tropes involving newcomers or those with no knowledge of "the true" world. She never comes across as weak or conventionally inexperienced, and while she is still clearly learning, she can easily hold her own against the others.
The comic also spends a great deal of time going back and forth between the various elements of the story. It sets up a massive number of players, figureheads and basic elements within the universe in quick succession. This serves to establish a sense of legacy and history that many comics typically lack in their early stages, and offers an indication of its possible future. Rather than just informing us that "the world is bigger than you know" the reader is quickly shown clear indications of just this. It's not enough to spoil everything at once, but the very existence of metahumans, Skywatch's massive orbital facilities and Halo's mysterious benefactors all contribute to a sense of mystery. It's just one that we immediately get a few actual answers to, rather than dragging it all out.
Finally, and most pressingly, the initial volume ends with a major bombshell being dropped. This not only further cements how the world is rapidly changing, but also the mentality of one of its major players. Rather than cartoonishly evil, it instead highlights a truly disturbing element of the wrong person being in power and having no restraint. It's difficult to pull off, but Ellis' is a master with such characters. As it ties into a rapid succession of similar surprises, but rather than appearing cluttered, it instead helped set in place the last few bricks to establish this new world. It was enough by the end to ensure that I would personally come back for another look.
That last point is a very good thing, given how flawed of a start The Wild Storm suffered from.
The Bad
As first impressions go, The Wild Storm does not do much to entice new readers. While the basic concepts and details are engaging after a while, the odd choice of moment to introduce the story gave the comic an extremely weak start. You end up with a series of rapidly delivered info-dumps on seemingly bland subjects. On a re-read, you can see why the choice was made, but on the first go you just get the following: A bland and basic attempt by rich men to steal corporate secrets from one another. Arguments from seemingly unrelated people. Multiple organisations commenting on things without you knowing who they are first. And Angela - or the Engineer as she will become known - showing off her powers for the first time.
On the surface, that last point seems like it might tie it all together, but it doesn't. Angela makes a very poor impression of being incoherent, seemingly insane and quite unlikable, and even her more fantastical developments do not offer much in the way of engagement. All that we end up knowing is that she stole the technology that she uses to enhance herself. Why? No idea. There's no clear direction to her arc or motivation, and making this direction one more mystery atop of other mysteries robbed the story of a much-needed pillar it required to support itself. Without that, it only starts to come together three issues in.
A worse problem lies in how many characters it needs to keep juggling between and Ellis' inability to fully establish a better introduction to each one. The comic reads as if he needed to introduce everyone at once, and as such very few people get a substantial amount of time in the spotlight. A few get enough to highlight some fun moments, or even enough implications to keep them engaging, but more than a few others lack this. It's both rushed and cluttered, and it lacks the immediate simple narrative hooks to make it all work. It becomes especially bad when half the time certain characters seem to be added purely because they were in the original Wildstorm setting (Jenny Sparks shows up but does nothing, just to indicate how bad this is), but others hint at infinitely more interesting things than what is on the page. It goes well beyond laying the foundations for things to come, and just into an infuriating jumble of more engaging stories just out of reach.
The Verdict
The Wild Storm Vol. 1 is a deeply flawed but deeply brilliant creation. It's appropriate for the setting overall, but it can also be very offputting. Even as someone who had prior knowledge of most of the characters, and even a desire to stick with the series, it was difficult. It took multiple re-reads to get used to both the tone, and decide whether or not I fully enjoyed it. While this is a comic I would suggest to fans of darker or bleaker fantastical settings, the weak start does undermine it. My advice would be to get the first three or four issues over just one, and decide from there whether or not you enjoy it. The journey is worth it in the end, and Vol. 2 substantially improves on this part, but you have quite the hurdle to jump first.
Verdict: 6.5 out of 10
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