Thursday, March 13, 2008

Pre-Joe Casey Comics: Wildcats #2

[Continuing the lead-up posts to Joe Casey's run on Wildcats (volumes 2 and 3), which means more Scott Lobdell fun. New posts Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.]

Up until Joe Casey and Sean Phillips took over the title, Wildcats was a bimonthly book, which I think really hurt it as shown in the second issue, which has absolutely nothing to do with the first--aside from old characters from WildC.A.T.S. not hanging out as a team anymore.

In this issue's case, the former members are Voodoo and Maul (or Pris and Jeremy as they were named by their parents). They're roommates (or, Pris is crashing on his couch on a semi-permanent basis) and Jeremy is all in love with her and she seems flirty, but he's a dork and doesn't see it and spends all of his time in his lab working on reconstructing her DNA by floating in some weird tank all shrivelled up and shit--that is until some lady with a gun shows up and kidnaps them so he can cure some theoretical disease that she's infected with (and just infected him with) until the Bros. Death show up and lots of shooting happens and Daemonite shows Pris a trick or two and the day is saved, people are cured and Jeremy loses some data he needs.

Again, the pieces are here, but Lobdell doesn't really do anything with them. The four main characters of this issue (Jeremy, Pris, C.C. and the old daemonite) show up durin Casey's run where he takes these ideas and makes them work.

I remember when the Jeremy shrinking himself (kinda) was mentioned, Lobdell presented it as the coolest thing ever, but doesn't do anything with it here. Casey at least gave him a reason for altering his appearance like that, but Lobdell doesn't actually show or tell us why it's necessary for him to be in that form while doing his laboratory work.

These characters don't show up again while Lobdell is on the book.

Travis Charest's art is nice to look at.