I was quietly excited about news that Warren Ellis would be Jim Lee’s old Wildstorm panoply of characters, which I assume is part of DC’s Rebirth continuity rebooting. Ellis did a nice job on The Authority back in the day and I was looking forward to seeing more of that. Even better, Ellis has become more acerbic over the years and his snarky wit mouthed by the likes of Grifter would have been fun
But then, I read this:
So it seems that Ellis is sneaking the characters into a spy/science fiction and the masks, capes, some of the superpowers and all of the back history is mopped away.
Not sure how I feel about that. Has anyone read it?
I think I see the critic’s point. Ellis doesn’t seem to be taking over the characters because he likes them; he appears, rather, to be taking them over so he can destroy them. It’s a bad attitude to begin writing a series with.
I read the first issue and it was dull. Really, really dull. I might read issue two, but unless there’s a huge upswing in quality, I’m quitting with the next issue. Life is too short to read boring comics.
Midnighter is certainly a variation on a well-worn theme. But the character’s spectacularly imaginative brutality and penchant for torture, sardonic sense of humour, and, of course, that he is openly and happily gay, sets Midnighter apart from the black-clad flock.
Go_Arachnid_Laser - The Engineer wasn’t especially derivative. Angela Spica was a well-adjusted individual who happened to have a few litres of nanotechnology in her blood. The character’s personality reminded me a little of 1980s Donna Troy. The power-set was pretty unique.
Grifter was a happy-go-lucky freebooter, quite a different beast from fellow gun-wielding psychos like The Punisher, Deathstroke and Bullseye (who now seems to have his own series?!).
Granted, Zealot was certainly a cookie-cut “bad tempered girl with sword”, and Voodoo was pretty one-dimensional. But not all of the Wildstorm characters were thus.
