Online Encyclopedia
Wildstorm
Wildstorm Productions, or simply WildStorm, is an American publisher of comic books. It began as Jim Lee's personal company under Image Comics, but it is currently owned by DC Comics with Jim Lee as the imprint's editor.
The Image years
WildStorm was one of the founding studios that joined together in 1992 to form Image Comics. It grew out of Homage Studios which was founded by artists Scott Williams, Whilce Portacio , Jim Lee, and Joe Chiodo in San Diego, California. Lee, Williams, and Portacio had gained notoriety from their work on various X-Men titles at Marvel Comics.
In late 1992 penciler Marc Silvestri joined the studio to work on the first issue of "Cyberforce". Although he worked at the studio, his projects were to debut as a new Image imprint named Top Cow. Silvestri continued to work out of WildStorm's studio for about two years, then moved his staff up to Santa Monica so that he could be closer to Hollywood. Although there was some thought of grabbing talent from the "Big Two"" (Marvel and DC), Lee decided instead to find new talent.
Lee's talent search yielded Brett Booth in 1992, and then J. Scott Campbell in 1993. Apart from McFarlane's Spawn, Wildstorm produced the most consistently commercially successful comics from Image, including Lee's own titles WildC.A.T.s and the teen hero title Gen13, illustrated by J. Scott Campbell. Like many other Image titles, some of the WildStorm titles were plagued with inconsistent completion and shipping, resulting in "monthly" comics coming out every few months. This era, however, produced a number of titles of varying popularity including the afformentioned Gen13 and WildC.A.T.s, Stormwatch, Deathblow , Cybernary , and Whilce Portacio's Wetworks .
Attempts to get his studio's characters into other media were disappointing. A Saturday morning cartoon series of "WildCATS" suffered from poor production values, and lasted only a single season, while a full-length animated version of "Gen13" was released straight-to-video due to Disney's distribution problems. Toys from both titles were less successful than those made by Todd McFarlane, partly due to bad marketing and partly due to the fact that the McFarlane toys were targeted for a more mature audience.
In 1995, WildStorm created an imprint named Homage Comics, centered around more writer-driven books. The imprint was started with Kurt Busiek's Astro City and The Wizard's Tale , James Robinson's Leave it to Chance (with Paul Smith) and Jeff Mariotte 's Desperadoes (with John Cassaday). More recently, the imprint has featured works by Sam Kieth, including Zero Girl and Four Women , and two of Warren Ellis' pop-comics mini-series, Mek and Reload.
1997 debuted the Cliffhanger imprint - a line of creator-owned comic books which included to this day such popular works as J. Scott Campbell's Danger Girl, Joe Madureira's Battlechasers , Humberto Ramos 's Crimson , Joe Kelly & Chris Bachalo 's Steampunk , Kurt Busiek & Carlos Pacheco 's Arrowsmith and Warren Ellis's Red and Tokyo Storm Warning .
This year also saw a huge revamp of all the Wildstorm universe titles, including such prominent comic book names as Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Adam Warren , Sean Phillips and Joe Casey . After this revamp the new Wildcats series, Stormwatch and DV8 took the places of the most popular and most commercialy sucessfull comics of the Wildstorm Universe.
The DC Years
The upsurge in popularity of the Wildstorm titles resulted in the 1998 acquisition of Wildstorm by DC Comics. According to DC this was to "...strengthen both WildStorm's ability to expand its editorial goals and diversifying DC's output".
1998 was a hallmark year for Wildstorm. They launched The Authority, a dark, violent, superhero comic with heroes who didn't care about such things as honorable battle or not killing their opponents - only making the world a better place. Warren Ellis created the comic from the ashes of Stormwatch, writing its first 12 issues before handing the series over to Mark Millar. The Authority fused the hope and strivings of the Silver Age superheroes with a cynical look at humanity. The fight between the heroes and the corrupt parts of the humanity would lead the series into the 2004 Wildstorm crossover - Coup d'Etat where the Authority would take control of the United States of America. Ellis, along with the artist John Cassaday, created Planetary, a story about explorers of the strange, intermeshing a look at pop culture, comic book history and literature with the unique artwork of John Cassaday.
Around this time WildStorm also launched a new imprint, America's Best Comics, specifically to allow Alan Moore to create a number of comics based on his own ideas. The line has been widely lauded and awarded, and has created such titles as Promethea, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tomorrow Stories, Tom Strong and Top 10.
2001 marked the start of Ed Brubaker's criticaly acclaimed Sleeper, set in the Wildstorm universe, and Warren Ellis's Global Frequency. Global Frequency may yet prove to be the first productive foray for WildStorm into other media, as the rights were bought by Warner Brothers in 2004, and the pilot for a TV series is currently in the making.
To this day, WildStorm has been varying its publishing with licensed properties, such as Thundercats, Robotech and Speed Racer, and with original graphical novels from the pens of such famour SF writers as Kevin J. Anderson and David Brin.
Notable publications
- Wildstorm Universe titles / Eye of the Storm
- Wildstorm titles - Beyond the Storm
- 21 Down
- Ex Machina
- Global Frequency
- Homage titles
- Desperadoes
- Kurt Busiek's Astro City
- Leave it to Chance
- Mek
- Reload
- Zero Girl
- Cliffhanger titles
- Arrowsmith
- Battlechasers
- Crimson
- Danger Girl
- Red
- Steampunk
- Tokyo Storm Warning
- America's Best Comics titles
- Wildstorm official web site http://www.wildstorm.com/