WildCATS - Does Alan Moore do hack jobs?

[Trout]

I picked this up thanks to Amazon credit as a Christmas gift and, as it's a bit of an odd fish, wanted to post a wee review and seek comment from the board.

I suspect this one can be added to the list of Alan Moore comics which aren't nearly as good as you hope they'll be. I say that as a major Moore fan. He's my hero, but I think this stuff may be more hit than miss.

At £15 from Amazon, it's quite good value for money, as there are 15 comics reprinted in it.

I wasn't too familiar with the Wildcats characters, but the gist appears to be they're a "Covert Action Team" fighting some sort of war against alien invaders, and fighting crime.
The Moore issues see the main team off-planet finding out everything they know is a lie (now, where did I pick up that phrase?) while a bunch of second-string heroes fill in for them back home.

It's a fairly straight-forward superhero team book, I suppose. There is a full story arc, with a twist in the tail, but it didn't blow me away.

That said, there are some moments of Moorey genius, like the two cyborgs beating the crap out of one another while simultaneously setting up a date.
Also, I think the big reveal would have had more impact if I hadn't already read Ed Brubaker's Sleeper.
Humungous spoilers for Wildcats, but not Sleeper: The character Tao is, of course, the main villain in Sleeper from its start, but in Wildcats he's still a "hero." The twist is his unmasking as a traitor who's maipulating everyone.
I couldn't even judge if I would have been surprised without knowing. He does seem pretty sinister throughout, I suppose.

So, this is more a book for Wildstorm enthusiasts - I have some stuff, and like a lot of it, but wouldn't have felt the need top buy this if it wasn't Moore.

Dare I say it - is this a hack job?

- Trout

[Trout]

Sorry - altered the thread title before posting.

This refers to The Complete Alan Moore WildCATS book.

[pauljholden]

I read some of the individual issues when they came out - the big reveal did have an impact.

I think it's a decent superhero team book. It's not up there with Watchmen, but what is? It's certainly as decent as Moore's other superhero strips.

(Having said that, I did by a Moore wildCATS spin off book, Voodoo, IIRC, that I just couldn't get through - but that might, in large part, be down to the art).


-pj

[paulvonscott]

I got Wild Words just before Christmas, a companion Wildstorm effort.  The only saving grace is that I paid £4 for it.  

I suspect Alan Moore was working with some dreadfull material and terrible characters, with some pretty desperate art (very flash, very bombastic, no backgrounds).

Sparks of brilliance, and there's one good story in, but overall pretty uninspired.  They aren't long runs, and I'm guessing the employers weren't paying him to reinvent the characters.  And as you say, he has to eat.

Such is the power of Alan Moore, Trout, that if I saw WildWords cheap, I'd still pick it up and rake through the muck for the gems.

I wonder if it was working on this nonsense (and the Supreme stuff, the first book of which is rather good) that lead to him thinking up the ABC stuff which is a cut above the general fare dished out by comic companies.

Anyway thanks for the warning, I suspected as much, but nice to know.

If only someone would bite the bullet and release miracleman.

[ukdane]

I've considered this, and the WildCATS v3.0, but always resisted. If Morrison's WildCATS had taken off and caught my interest, I probably would have picked this (and the v3) books up, but Morrison/Wildstorm have lost those sales through f**king up the Wildstorm line.

[Byron Virgo]

I read the Wild Words collection, which I think was hoping to capitalise on the sleeer success of Alan Moore's DC Universe (or whatever they've retitled it as), but only served to show how poor it was in comparison. Probably worst offender is the WildC.A.T.s/Spawn crossover, which really is genuinely awful apart from the opening and closing page.

Moore said that at the time he was trying to second guess what the audience wanted, looking at the typical Image style and deciding that what they wanted was lots of splash pages, violence and what our American cousins charmingly refer to as 'cheesecake'. Eventually he came to his senses, but at least it did lead to Supreme and the ABC line.

[Arkwright99]

While not a major work, Moore's WildCATS run is quite interesting if you consider the target audience it was written for. While he was busy dismantling the Intergalactic war storyline (and exploring issues like segregation and racism) in the off-world storyline, in the Earth-based Gang War storyline Moore basically wrote a Watchmen-lite for the Image generation. I read the comic when it originally came out in monthly instalments having bought WildCATS from the start, and one of the initial criticisms of Image was while the art was nice to look at the stories weren't exactly anything to write home about. In hiring Alan Moore Image added a great dollop of kudos to one of its flagship titles. Because it was essentially work for hire it's not surprising that rather than come up with anything hugely original, Moore just re-tooled his (then) greatest success. Which isn't to say there aren't moments of greatness in the run: Maxine the cyborg-babe is a fantastic character and TAO had 'cool' running all the way through him like a stick of rock. Travis Charist's artwork is firing on all cylinders so it's unfortunate that, even drawing only half the comic, Charist wasn't able to see things through to the end, since the replacement artists weren't as good. Is it hack work? Yes undoubtedly, but that doesn't mean that Moore didn't try to do something that the average Image reader wouldn't have seen before. I think it also proved to Moore himself that not everything he wrote had to be 'the greatest thing ever'. He could write just for the fun of it.

[Trout]

Thanks, all, for your comments, but particularly demos99 for his insight.

I had similar thoughts on the series, despite my limited experience of it, and I take the point that even Alan Moore doesn't produce unrivalled genius every time he writes something.

That said, I do feel glad I bought it and I'll hold on to it. I'm sure I'll enjoy a re-read sooner or later, too.

- Trout