Reading Pile: Wildstorm: A Celebration of 25 Years HC

Being nearly a decade late for this nostalgia party has only added more bittersweet nostalgia

You ever pick up books and figure 'Yeah, I'll want to read this' and then the book is banished into the Phantom Zone of your various reading piles until you unearth it after multiple emergencies such as your apartment flooding? Yeaaaah. Yeah me too. Anywho.

This was released in 2017 as a celebration/tribute to the Wildstorm imprint that had been shuttered back in 2010. After that a bunch of its characters were unfortunately merged into the main DC lines with the dark times that were the NEW 52, and there were some revivals in 2017 and so on and on. But forget about all that came after, because most of it is forgettable anyway. What we have here is an interesting little snapshot of tone in an weird point of time for the imprint's history. This package is an editorial love letter that has its heart in the right place, even if some of the content feels like odd filler. And I'm not talking about the pin-ups or unused and previously unpublished material, that's all great. Honestly, more of that and less B&W reprints please.

If you're a Jim Lee fan, then the B&W reprint of WildCATS #1 is a treat and it makes perfect sense to open the entire package with that issue as it's the progenitor of the imprint. The reprint of the Grant Morrison relaunch of WildCATS also makes sense as they wanted to include the script to the never published second issue. Then they dump the first two issues of the Mark Millar Authority run in B&W with minor changes and while I get the inclusion, it's also a run I absolutely hated. That's just me though as this was a peak time of what I consider some of Millar's worst atrocities in comics. But I digress. There's a reprint of the prelude to Sleeper Season two, which is solid as Sean Phillips' art is great. Then finally we get a reprint from the Eye Of The Storm Annual which almost feels out of place, but it does feel like one of the most Wildstorm-y stories I've ever read and it features art by the late great Jason Pearson, and I'm just happy to see him here.

This is just one of the bittersweet elements to me, as in the years since this was published we have lost Pearson, Tim Sale, and John Cassaday. While hitting their pages of pin-up art or other contributions was sad, it made me glad that past me thought to grab this out of general curiosity and for the new stories.

The new stories are brief and most have a melancholy sense of 'Remember when we had fun' or 'Ya did good, kid' to them. We get a five page Deathblow piece by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi, a three page Gen 13 from J. Scott Campbell, an eight page Backlash story from Brett Booth, a return to the Authority with Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, a nice WildCATS bit from Christos Gage and Dustin Nguyen that revisits the engaging Joe Casey period of the title, and the final Majestic piece by Dan Abnett and Neil Googe that ends the book with a 'To Be Continued' tone.

These are sadly too brief and don't really do much for me storywise, so the rest of the package that I found to be more fulfilling is the assortment of pin-ups, design work, unused covers, never used promo pieces, and other lost material they used to pad out the book. I live for this type of stuff, so seeing things like Cully Hamner's layouts and character designs for a never realized Authority run or Ed McGuinnness' design for a proposed Majestic statue all scratch a particular itch in my brain. There's a Batman/Gen 13 promo image for a crossover that never happened that unlocked a chunk of comic memories for me, so having a copy of it pop up here is just a fun inclusion and I wish we had more books that collected these types of things.

Despite some elements of this landing kind of weak for me, it's an interesting collection of works that encapsulates a weird and engaging tone. It was a sad little remembrance at the time of its release, made sadder for the people we've lost since. At the same time, it's not like Wildstorm and its properties are lost to history as they've found other ways to live on. You can appreciate the earnest of their effort here, but also don't worry guys, Midnighter is definitely gunna stick around for a long while yet.

I would say that if you're a completist for any of the previously mentioned creators or titles then this is worth the $29.99 price tag. It doubles as an art book, and if you're like me and like weird collections of oddball publishing material, then there's plenty of extras worth checking out.