Well, it’s here. We’ve had a lot of build-up to this, the issue that marks the half-way point in this series. Nice build-up. Gorgeous build-up. Amusing build-up. Even absorbing build-up. But build-up all the same. Now, it’s time for the members of Jacob Marlowe’s wild CAT (Grifter, Void, John Colt and Kenesha) to put their plan into action, while at the same time Jackie King’s team of IO tech-geeks set theirs in motion, too. Will there be sparks (and blood, for that matter) flying? Will it all go off without a hitch? More importantly, will the patience of this series’ generally enthusiastic readers be rewarded?
Let’s find out, eh?
Continue reading “Bang, Bang, Bang! – The Wild Storm #12 Review”
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Warren Ellis might just be the biggest tease in comics right now. With the delicacy and lightness of touch of the most exotic of dancers, he has unpeeled the various layers of the Wild Storm universe, each revelation accompanied by narrative moves of pulse-quickening, breath-taking skill, enabled by the extraordinary art of Jon Davis-Hunt. There is, of course, a fine line between teasing and frustrating. It’s a subjective judgment and individuals’ mileage varies considerably with this sort of thing. Some readers are undoubtedly frustrated with this series’ apparent reluctance to bring the building tension between IO and Skywatch to a climax and, if they were expecting things to start here, they’ll be disappointed. For, yes, this is another issue that, despite its somewhat misleading cover, is concerned principally with set-up and background.
I’m not sure whether I’ve pointed it out before, but The Wild Storm is what was in the old days called a maxi-series. Each issue’s cover features a strip of numbers below the title running from 1 to 24 with the current issue’s number picked out with an arrow of the kind I used to use when keeping score at snooker as a spotty youth. I mention this simply to remind everyone that we’re currently only a sixth of the way in to whatever Warren Ellis has planned for this reimagining of the Wildstorm universe. Or, to put it another way, don’t let last issue’s explosion of action, glorious though it was, fool you into expecting more of the same this time round. For some, there’ll inevitably be a bit of disappointment at this and I understand that. I don’t want you to think, however, that we’ve returned to an issue of people talking wittily at one another about things of which they’re already aware but about which the reader doesn’t have a clue. Oh, no. This time around, we begin to get… information.