This week, DC Comics relaunches, yet again, Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.s, this time with Lee himself on pencils and comics auteur Grant Morrison doing the writing chores. Judging by the previews, it seems to be a "back to its roots" approach to the characters, who look very much like they did when they first burst onto the scene in 1992. It seems Jim keeps wanting to return to that period in his life, when he was riding high on his success from Marvel's X-Men and hoping to channel all of that popularity into his own creations, essentially a bunch of thinly-disguised X-Men clones.
He seems to forget that the reason why he and his cohorts at Wildstorm have had to reinvent WildC.A.T.s (who at one point became the Wildcats) several times over was that people just didn't take to his characters and their convoluted space-opera storylines. He seems to forget that not even Alan Moore could elevate his creations past the copycat X-Men they really were. Look, I can even name the Marvel Comics analogues for several of the prinicipal characters:
Spartan-Cyclops (hell, Jim probably didn't think Scott was much more than a robot, anyway)
Warblade-Wolverine
Zealot-Psylocke/Elektra (any other girl in a skimpy ninja/Hand outfit)
Grifter-Gambit meets Wolverine
John Lynch-Nick Fury
I hardly think that Morrison will succeed where Moore failed.
What's sad about this particular development is that it feels like a huge step backward from what has essentially been a very healthy, steady evolution of the Image Comics line. Granted, he is no longer part of them but of the DC Universe, but no one can deny him his role in kick starting the biggest challenge Marvel and DC have ever faced to their chokehold on the market.
What started out as six Marvel Comics artists essentially wanting to flex their own creative muscles and cash in on their massive popularity has become a truly diverse repository of talents and stories.
Although a lot of the original Image characters were ripoffs of the Marvel characters on whom the Image founders had made their names (Spawn, for example, owes his origin to Ghost Rider and the nature of his costume, a 'neural parasite' to Spider-Man's symbiote), they had the right philosophy, which was essentially to give struggling creators a venue to publish their own creations, and as a result some remarkably talented people have come to light whose work may not have seen the light of day otherwise. Marvel, who now depends largely on the talents of Brian Michael Bendis, owe a good part of their current success to the Image philosophy.
The bad news for Image is that as a company, they're no longer the market force they used to be, with Spawn, their top selling title, lingering near the bottom of the Top 100 list of comic books every month. The good news, however, is that they aren't really driven by these numbers, and as a result they are still able to put out some quality, offbeat books every month that aren't tied into the latest 52nd Infinite Civil Annihilation. Books like Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, the Luna Brothers' Girls, and other non-superhero fare are still around for whoever wants to buy them.
Image Comics, by coming when they did, truly revitalized the comic book industry. I remember the mid-nineties crash was loaded with more terrible books with variant/foil/embossed/die-cut covers than an average collector could shake a stick at. Marvel had gone incestuous (as Joe Quesada put it), giving choice writing gigs to its editorial staff instead of searching for new talent, and as a result coming up with extremely mediocre stories, and DC was, well, killing Superman or maiming Batman.
Image managed to put the emphasis back on the importance of creators. While it's nice to see talented new creators working on established characters like Spider-Man or Batman, it can be just as rewarding to see them come up with their own creations, which are that much more gratifying to read than the Marvel/DC character knockoffs that first populated the Image line of comics. Thanks to Image, now Marvel knows how to take much better care of its creative stable; it created the Icon line as a way to sweeten the pot for its existing superstars, who supposedly make all the money off their creator-owned books. Incidentally, none of the books in the Icon line feature superheroes as their main characters. All in the spirit of Image, really.
Given the sophistication which Image has achieved with its output, and its obvious influence on market juggernaut Marvel, it's sad to see one of the founding fathers of Image still preoccupied , after all these years, with pushing his pasteboard X-Men knockoffs.
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