Joe Casey's Wildcats

[Doktor]

Does anyone else miss this title like I do?

 

There's a couple other threads on the Ellis portion of the Wildstorm revolution in the early 00's, but does anyone else really appreciate how far ahead of its time Wildcats became under Joe Casey? Volume 2 and especially Version 3.0 were just spectacular comics in every way.

 

The corporation as a superhero? The benevolent AI? The idea of changing the face of the world not just by punching the bad guy in the face, but with something as simple as a battery that doesn't die? This was just great great stuff. With a secret warrior woman ninja clan war going on in the background & all that.

[krighton]

never liked Jim Lee's Wildcats so I steered clear just because of the name.

[F For Fake]

Never read that run, but I adored Alan Moore's run on the book. The concept is strong.

[Doktor]

Jim Lee's Wildcats suffered from pretty much the exact same problems all the other early Image books did: they were an excuse for Jim (and the others) to draw the same characters they did at Marvel, but slightly different in design, and have their buddies throw in some word bubbles after the fact. There was no thought to plotting or what the story was going to be about. Just drawing cool stuff & owning the characters instead of getting a page rate.

 

But Moore & Robinson's runs on the book changed that. And in Volume 2 & Version 3.0, when Joe Casey came in to clean up & start something new after Lobdell kinda killed off the remnants of everything left of the original series, it got actually interesting.

 

Big ideas got explored. The brightly colored spandex got toned down, the idea of actually saving the world from the shadows got played with. Using the resources of a multi-national corporation for something other than the financing for the next weird super-plane so you could go and punch the bad guy in the face. Science superhero-ing. It was really freaking good.

[Vikingreed]

I think I need to check this out...

[Doktor]

The Casey Wildcats are almost all in TPB

 

Volume 2 was collected as:

Street Smarts

Vicious Circles

Serial Boxes

Battery Park

 

And Version 3.0 was collected as:

Year One - (Brand Building/Full Disclosure)

Year Two (Tilting the Axis of the World/ Great Minds/ The Shot Heard Round the World/ Code War One)

 

 

You also get some great Travis Charest, Bryan Hitch, Lee Berjemo, Sean Phillips, Pasqual Ferry, Duncan Rouleau and Dustin Nguyen art in them too. All before they really hit it big (at except Charest) as "big draw" artists.

 

And I can't tell you how awesome the covers for all 24 issues of Version 3.0 were. There was serious design work put into every single one. They were selling every single issue like it was a product.