Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Wildcats: Vicious Circles

Written by Joe Casey
Art by Sean Phillips


I feel like I may have read the first one or two of these issues before, possibly when they originally came out about nine years ago, but I haven't really spent much time with Casey's version of the Wildcats, save for the latter half of his superb Version 3.0.

In this, his first volume, he works pretty quickly to arrange his new status quo. He gets rid of Lord Emp and some bad guy named Kenyan (who does not appear to be from Kenya), and moves the team to LA, where Spartan, now posing as Emp's great nephew, takes over the Halo Corporation and sets about improving the world. The animosity between Grifter and Spartan gets some play, and some of the other figures on the team get small appearances. It looks like Void gets taken out of the picture as well.

As a trade paperback, this doesn't all fit together. It's not a story per se, but it is the beginning of something good.

Phillips is his usual excellent self, establishing a non-superhero look for the book. Casey's writing is much more toned down than what he does now in titles like Godland or Dark Reign Zodiac, but he is clearly stretching the boundaries of the genre, especially when you consider that these books came out nine years ago.

No comments: