I bought the trades of the late 90s - early 2000s 2nd volume of WildCATS because I'd heard it lead into a lot of what Joe Casey did with volume 3 and I wanted to read that. So now you know what to expect for next week's Saturday Splash Page.
The series starts from the point that the whole big, galaxy and century-spanning war, of which the team was fighting a single front, had actually been over for a very long time. So, what now? Lord Emp, the little guy who ran the team, decides he ought to clean up a few of his messes and step aside, then leaves the Halo Corporation in the hands of the battle android Spartan, now listed as Jack Marlowe. So a machine built to fight has to decide how to run a company, and do so in a way it will materially improve the world.
Most of his attempts at that don't kick in until WildCATS 3.0, as he's largely preoccupied here with cleaning up old business. Grifter alternates between hanging around, questioning what Spartan's doing, and sleeping with women who remind him of Zealot, who he thinks is dead. She's not, and is in fact trying to clean up her old business, by wiping out the entire warrior religion/cult thing she established when she first came to Earth. Maul, who apparently grows smarter if he emaciates himself (inverse of using his powers to grow in size at the cost of intelligence), is busy trying to find a way to remove the Daemonite genetics from Voodoo as a way to be her white knight. Rather than just, you know, hanging out with her. Or bothering to ask her if she wants to be "cured." The alien symbiotic thing that bonded with a cosmonaut to form Void pops up, minus the cosmonaut.
(Other than one flashback issue early on when Scott Lobdell and Casey are co-writing the book, Warblade never appears. I don't know enough about the character to hazard a guess as to why Casey didn't include him. Grifter makes reference in the issue to a Soho art studio, so maybe Warblade was the most well-adjusted and went back to his own life as soon as possible.)
Grifter, Zealot and Maul are hung up on their pasts in various ways. Unable to accept things have changed, or that there's anything new to work towards. Voodoo seemed to content to just ignore her past. At least half of Void decided they were done and moved on. Whereas Spartan seems to almost resent every time he's forced to get involved in old business. It gives the impression that once Emp gave him a task, he programmed it into himself and anything that forces a deviation is a hindrance to be dealt with as soon as possible.
That's oversimplifying, of course. Spartan does take some things personally, but Phillips tends to draw his as this stoic, distant figure. He glowers occasionally, but never seems pleased by anything. Grifter spends most of his time looking like a scruffy drunk, sneering and shouting. But it's scruffy looking book in general, drenched in shadows. Especially when those two are in it. The sections focused on Maul and Voodoo are usually brighter, until the descendant of some guy Emp fought decades ago called Slaughterhouse Smith shows up. Then it's a lot of dark hospital rooms.
Casey adds a couple of characters to the cast as he's shuffling others out. Agent Wax, who has a telepathy/hypnosis thing going, and works for the U.S. government investigating superhuman stuff, and Noir, who is kind of a hacker/arms dealer. Guy who thinks he's the smartest person in the room, and who loves to mess with Grifter by implying all his aggression is repressed homosexual tendencies. He's a really annoying character, so the shocking yet inevitable betrayal and subsequent comeuppance are very satisfying.
He also brings in a cyborg named Maxine Manchester that was apparently a pre-existing character, and well, I'm not sure about his use of her. Grifter brings her along because they more or less run into each other on separate business and he figures it'll keep the destruction down. She hangs around being loud, but does try to help with Smith (granted, because she's bored and wants to fight rather than anything altruistic) and gets badly damaged. Spartan and Grifter basically shrug and say, "She deserved it."
I mean that literally. Grifter refers to her as a 'stupid bitch,' while she laying there smoking and Spartan agrees she, 'paid the price for her impatience.' Noir shuts down her sentience and turns her into a killbot for his aforementioned betrayal, and they still don't really care.
Maybe she tried to kill the team in the past and I should feel as bad for her as if something awful happened to Sabretooth or the Joker. Which is to say, not at all. All I have to go off is what's in this volume, which is some weird cyborg cult tried to kill her for having too many organic parts, and then the stuff I detailed above. None of which seems to merit the callous response, especially as there is no pushback whatsoever in the narrative against it. Are we meant to agree with it, or see it as evidence of how fucked up Grifter is and how inhuman Spartan is that they basically don't care?
It reminds me of Stacy X in Casey's Uncanny X-Men run where I can't tell if he wants me to take Stacy's side when Angel/Iceman/Wolverine start giving her shit (which I generally do), or if he expects me to agree with the more established characters who I think are acting like judgemental dicks.
I'm not really inclined to give Casey the benefit of the doubt considering the treatment of most female characters in this run. The descendant (who shoots fire from his eyes) goes around brutally murdering a bunch of women who have the last name "Marlowe" before he actually manages to find "Jack", and due to her having a Halo credit card in Jack's name, he goes after Voodoo. Who he paralyzes, cuts off her legs and cuts her vocal cords. She gets better as part of accepting her Daemonite heritage, but not after Maul can feel guilty, Grifter can want revenge, and Spartan can do the bare minimum of glowery emoting.
There's Void, who loses half of herself, then is nearly destroyed in yet another phase of Noir's plan, only for the symbiote to be absorbed by Spartan, giving him the teleportation powers and a shiny silver suit look he carries through the next volume. But I don't know if she even qualified as a character by that point. Minus the cosmonaut, she didn't demonstrate much personality in her brief time on page. Other than she either knew French, or could learn it instantly from Noir saying a couple of sentences.
It all seems to come to the point that Spartan, while still seemingly just following an order, is evolving into something new and his past life is to be left by the wayside, no longer relevant. We'll look at how the evolution goes next week.
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