WildStorm

» see wildstorm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

American direct-market comics never had a distribution route into Turkey worth the name. There were no comic shops running Diamond accounts here, no Wednesday, no pull list. What arrived came as translated albums of European material, and much later as scans. A publisher like WildStorm, whose entire commercial existence depended on a specialty retail channel in North America, is therefore something I know through the internet rather than through a shelf.

It was founded in 1992 by Jim Lee, then one of the seven Marvel artists who had walked out to start Image Comics. Lee's studio was called Aegis Entertainment first and took the WildStorm Productions name in late 1993. It published through Image for six years before Lee sold it to DC Comics in late 1998, with the deal taking effect that January. He stayed, and eventually ran DC.

DC announced on 21 September 2010 that the imprint would end. The last issue was Wildcats volume 5 number 30, cover-dated December 2010, and the characters were folded into the main DC universe the following year when the company relaunched its whole line. The San Diego operation itself carried on, converted into DC's digital publishing arm, with most of the staff keeping their desks.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the studio system ~

Image in 1992 was organized as a federation of studios rather than as a single publisher, and WildStorm was the one that behaved most like an actual company. Lee hired staff, built a production pipeline and shipped on schedule, which in the early Image years was close to a competitive advantage on its own. The line opened with WildC.A.T.s in August 1992 and Stormwatch the year after, superhero books with covert-operations framing and a house art style that sold enormously and dated fast.

The editorial half outlasted the art. Several people who worked there left to build other publishers, most consequentially Ted Adams and his colleagues, who founded IDW Publishing in 1999. WildStorm also ran a jobbing licensed line, making comics out of properties from other media, and that work quietly funded the parts of the catalog people actually remember.

~ the authority ~

The reason this imprint matters is that it became the place where British writers were allowed to break the superhero. Warren Ellis took over Stormwatch in 1996, killed most of it off, and relaunched the survivors in 1999 as The Authority with Bryan Hitch drawing. That book invented a visual grammar the Marvel films would be using a decade later: enormous double-page spreads and cities destroyed at a scale the format had not tried before.

Under the same roof DC put a good deal of its creator-owned material, which is the other half of the legacy. Brian K. Vaughan wrote Ex Machina there from 2004. Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson started The Boys at WildStorm in 2006 before DC dropped it six issues in and Dynamite picked it up, which is how a book DC declined to keep publishing ended up as an Amazon series. Ellis wrote Planetary and Red for the imprint as well.

~ three thousand miles from new york ~

The studio sat in San Diego county for its whole life, which is not where American comics are made. Marvel and DC are New York businesses, and the distance from the editorial floor was part of what let WildStorm run differently. After September 2010 the same people kept working in the same place on DC's digital comics operation, and only the name on the door changed.

~ the name after the company ~

DC brought the word back on 16 February 2017, when Warren Ellis returned to write The Wild Storm, a twenty-four-issue series that restarted the continuity from scratch and finished in 2019. A few spin-offs ran alongside it. That was a label applied to a limited series, though, and not a publishing division with a staff: when it ended, DC put the characters back into its main line in 2021 and stopped using the banner again.

WildStorm Productions was a business with employees and an address in San Diego county, and it stopped being one in December 2010. What DC holds now is a trademark, taken off the shelf when a writer asks for it and put back when they are finished.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »