Back in the 1990s, Alan Moore’s career took some unusual
turns. Moore had always refused to work for Marvel,
a position attributed to Marvel’s lawsuits which had forced Moore to change the name of a classic British
character from Marvel Man to Miracle
Man. Then, Moore
had a falling out with DC as well. DC’s
loss was Image’s gain. Moore wrote Wildcats for Jim Lee and Supreme
for Rob Liefeld. Eventually, Moore even developed his
own world to play with under the Wildstorm umbrella: America’s Best Comics. And in a roundabout way, Moore returned to DC when DC bought out
Wildstorm. But while Moore may be remembered mostly for those key
series, he also wrote a few odds and ends along the way. Earlier this summer, Wildstorm collected the
odds and ends that Moore
wrote for their imprint in one big trade: Alan Moore: Wild Worlds.
Spawn/Wildcats (1996)
This is not a good opening story. Even that’s being generous: this is not a
good story period. Moore’s story is so standard it feels like
he’s working from a “paint by numbers” kit.
He starts with a three-page description of the nature of magic and the
nature of the universe. By the third
page of the actual plot, Spawn has busted into the Wildcats’ Halo headquarters
and is beating them up for no apparent reason.
The Wildcats are able to restrain him once Spawn realizes that these
aren’t the Wildcats that attacked him.
Nope, he’s apparently been attacked by Wildcats from the future. The future Wildcats then show up to explain
where they come from and what they were doing when they attacked Spawn. Then they convince the modern Wildcats and
Spawn to come into the future with them in order to fight the evil despot. Oh, and the evil despot of the future is Spawn.
It’s like Alan Moore had a checklist. It’s a crossover so the heroes have to fight
for no reason. Check. And then team up. Check.
It’s like Alan Moore had a shopping list from other stories. Here’s a little X-Men: Days of Future
Past. Here’s a little Terminator 2. Here’s a little Incredible Hulk: Future
Imperfect. It really is that obvious and
that bad. It’s so bad I’m amazed that
Alan Moore’s name is on this thing.
The second issue is just as bad as Spawn and the modern
Wildcats run around the “Future Imperfect” scenario. The third issue is slightly better. Apparently, even Alan Moore couldn’t keep
that up for long. With this issue, he
starts to introduce a few twists from the Wildstorm universe. The Gen13 guys are serving the future Spawn
as his bodyguards. The girls from Gen13
and Stormwatch are stuck in his harem, with their powers removed- a change
which also takes away Fairchild’s beauty.
And the future Spawn has some inventive tortures from Greek mythology
that he’s using on immortals like Jacob Marlowe. It’s not typical Alan Moore genius. But at least, it feels like he’s trying
again.
The fourth issue also tries to be a bit more than a standard
superhero crossover. It plays with the
idea of the time paradox- that the moment that set Spawn on the path to
becoming this evil dictator was going into the future with the Wildcats. It’s not the first time travel story to
address the time paradox. And it’s not
the best example. But again, it’s nice
to see the attempt at something more than a fight-fest in the future. However, even these little improvements at
the end can’t save this story. They only
raise it from awful to mediocre and a story that starts out awful and ends up
mediocre is still a bad story.
Wildstorm Spotlight 1 (1997)
Now, this is the Alan Moore we’ve come to admire. One of the things that Alan Moore brought to
these Image comics was an almost open acknowledgement that these characters
were derivative. Yet he did so in a way
that wasn’t dismissive. Rather, he would
use the Image characters to tell the kind of archetypal stories that he would
have done if he was still working on Superman.
His Supreme certainly had that feel and with this story, Alan Moore
brings the same sensibility to Mr. Majestic.
Mr. Majestic is an immortal.
Even though he’s playing at being a superhero now, he will live
forever. With this spotlight issue,
Alan Moore looks way into the future. He
looks to the death of the universe.
Majestic is one of the few beings left alive. At the start of the story, they are down to
the final nine. That’s right- there are
only nine beings alive in the entire universe.
Slowly, these characters also pass away.
Some choose to go- no longer wanting to live in an empty world. Others choose to hang on as long as they can-
to let the universe die around them and to go out with the very end.
It’s a very powerful story.
Moore
introduces some truly unusual creatures.
He gives them very different insights into life, the death and the
universe. The story has a very somber
feel, yet it doesn’t feel pessimistic.
The characters are resigned to their fate yet they’re not upset about
it. They even manage to find something
resembling love before the end.
The story itself is evocative of Moore’s Superman masterpieces: “For the Man
Who Has Everything” and “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” It isn’t a knock-off of those stories. It’s their peer. This is the kind of story that prompts us to
use the term “genius” for Alan Moore.
And it’s somewhat startling that we could go from something so bad like
Spawn/Wildcats to something so good like Mr. Majestic with just the flip of a
page.
Voodoo: Dancing in the Dark (1999)
For those who don’t know, Voodoo is a member of the
Wildcats. Her other name is Priscilla
Kitaen and before the Wildcats found her, she was an exotic dancer. Okay, she was a stripper who became a
superhero. We can thank Jim Lee for that
one. A lot of the other Wildcats
characters had their own mini-series by this point- Grifter,
Spartan, Warblade, Zealot- but not Voodoo.
So Alan Moore gave her one.
I skipped out on this when it was first published because it
looked like it was going to be more about Voodoo as a stripper than Voodoo as a
superhero and that just wasn’t the kind of story I was interested in. But I always wondered if I missed out on
something more than the sex. That
nagging little voice was right. There is
a lot more to this story than just a superhero going back to being a stripper.
Admittedly, that’s where the story begins. The Wildcats have disbanded. They’ve gone their separate ways. For Voodoo, that means going back to her
earlier career. She decides to set up in
New Orleans and
look for a job there. She’s just off the
bus and she already runs into some strange characters. One of these strange characters brings her to
a club where she can find work. And she
auditions, giving us the fan service scene that I had expected. However, I’m already intrigued. The unusual characters obviously have some connection
to voodoo. There’s more to them than
meets the eye. It almost felt like I was
reading American Gods or Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It’s the same sort of set-up. Ordinary person, in this case a stripper from
out of town, meets some “gods” in the guise of not-quite-ordinary people.
Indeed, that’s the direction in which Alan Moore takes the
story. Before long, Voodoo finds herself
caught in a web of intrigue with ghost mansions, dead preachers and the gods of
voodoo come to life. And there’s a
stripper murder mystery to tie everything together. There’s still some sex, but less and less as
the story goes along. Voodoo keeps her
clothes on for almost all of the last two issues. I guess that some people may have been disappointed
by that. But I was kind of amused that
Alan Moore took a fan service book down an Anansi Boys road and manages to make
it work.
Deathblow: By-Blows (1999)
This is the story for old-time Alan Moore fans. If you’re at all familiar with his pre-DC
work, you’ll probably enjoy this one, too.
Deathblow was one of Wildstorm’s bigger characters. He was a Punisher-like character who starred
in his own title for a while. Then, he
was killed off as the major character sacrifice to the crossover gods at the
end of “Fire from Heaven.” He’s still
dead. But that doesn’t prevent Alan
Moore from writing a mini-series about him.
The story opens with a woman who pushes herself out of an
egg-shaped pod. She doesn’t speak. She’s on an alien landscape. And she has to fight for survival by killing
off a predator even before she finds some clothes. The only identification that she has is a set
of dog-tags telling her that she’s Genevieve Cray, #08, a female. And that’s the Deathblow connection as the
original Deathblow was named Michael Cray.
Genevieve wanders around this weird world. She runs into other humans, all of whom share
the Cray surname. Some are little
boys. Some are super-cyborgs. Genevieve now has to fight for her survival
against these unnatural predators. And
when she sleeps, she has weird dreams that she’s a big, burly guy (whom some of
us recognize as the original Deathblow).
Genevieve doesn’t know what’s going on and neither do we. Instead, we’re left to figure out along with
the characters.
As I noted earlier, it feels like old school Alan
Moore. It’s an odd, dystopic and
unexplained setting. We can make some
guesses. Genevieve must be a clone of
Michael Cray, the original Deathblow.
But why are she and the other clones so different from one another? Where are they? And how did they get there? Genevieve isn’t the kind of person to ask
these questions. Even so, Alan Moore
sprinkles the answers in the edges of the story. By the time, we’re done, we know what’s going
on and Alan Moore has introduced a new Deathblow into the Wildstorm
universe. It’s not as good as the
previous two stories, but it’s much better than the opening one. And it has that old school feel that a lot of
fans might enjoy.
Wildcats 50 (1998)
Alan Moore’s biggest work for Wildstorm had been on the
flagship title Wildcats. He introduced
readers to the home-world of Khera and to a second team of Wildcats. He exposed the dark underbelly of an otherwise
utopian alien world. He started a gang
war and introduced villains who always seemed to be six steps ahead of the new
‘Cats. It’s one of Alan Moore’s best
works as he showed what could be done in a straight superhero story. Yet only about a year after Moore was finished with the title, Wildcats
was slated for cancellation. Alan Moore
came back to write a back-up story for the final issue. It’s a coda to his earlier run, and it’s
included here as a coda to this volume.
The coda is something of a love letter to fans of Moore’s work on
Wildcats. If you haven’t read that, then
this probably isn’t going to mean much to you.
With this story, Moore
takes one more peak at some of the characters that he created for the series or
brought into prominence: Ladytron, Majestic and Savant. He ties up one loose end- a villain who had
kind of fallen out of the story. And,
just for fun, he creates a new loose end in its place- a villain thought to be
dead who has apparently escaped and simply writes a letter to inform the
Wildcats of his continued freedom. As a
fan of Moore’s
Wildcats, I enjoyed this story.
Everybody else will have to wait for Wildstorm to collect Moore’s Wildcats run for
this to make sense. But it’ll be worth
it.
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