Saturday Splash Page #32

 

"Hard Knock Life," in WildCATS Version 3.0 #5, by Joe Casey (writer), Dustin Nguyen (penciler), Richard Friend (inker), Randy Mayor (colorist), RS and Comicraft (letterers)

Sometimes with these, I'm caught between what looks like the more interesting page, and what better represents the series. Today, I went with the first option, because I didn't really want to post a page of Spartan saying he now owns a car factory. I plan to go the other direction in a couple of weeks.

The previous volume ended with Spartan learning that the dimension Void and Noir were exploring was a source of nearly limitless energy. Batteries of all sizes that never ran out of power, and could, in fact, remove the need for internal combustion engines. From there, Casey and Nguyen explore Spartan's attempts to use this to improve the world, and how the world - or at least the people who fancy themselves the movers and shakers of it - respond.

Since Casey shuffled most of the cast off into one ending or another in the previous volume, there's really just Spartan and Grifter for this book to focus on. Spartan is moving forward, focused on making lots of these new batteries, and later on, cars that use said batteries as fuel cells. He's also focused on product placement in movies and ad campaigns, really saturating the market. Truly noble pursuits.

Grifter, meanwhile, is still clinging to the old life. Getting into gunfights, helping kidnap a major arms dealer/information broker's son back from his crazy FBI agent father, that kind of shit. Even when the injuries he sustains in the fight pictured above sideline him physically, he finds ways to keep a hand in. First by dragging one of Halo's accountants into it as his proxy, later by piloting Maxine Manchester's body remotely like an Iron Man suit.

Yeah, the treatment of Maxine doesn't get any better in this volume than in the previous one. We get some vague assurance her sentience is stored on a server somewhere while Grifter co-opts her body, but there's apparently been no effort to help her. Worse, Spartan had his ad people gimmick up some chibi -fied monstrosity as the company mascot to pop up in all their commercials. 

I am again confused on what Joe Casey expects me to conclude from all this. We also get a delightful bit where one of Spartan's other accountants snaps and straight kills a man on the freeway because he's frustrated over losing control of his life. Spartan basically erases all the evidence and makes it look like the victim was killed elsewhere. Am I supposed to conclude he feels a measure of responsibility for messing up this guy's life so completely in his grand design, or that he just thinks the guy is a useful pawn? 

Agent Wax, who Casey introduced in the previous volume, acts as Spartan's man within the government, while also using his hypnotic powers to fuck his boss' wife. There's some brief handwave by Wax that she wouldn't be as susceptible if she weren't into it that I hope we're meant to read as Wax justifying his actions to himself, and he eventually falls in love with her to the point he kills her husband and assumes his identity (which means he's hypnotizing everyone all the time to see him as that guy?) Still, pretty creepy. and again, Spartan seems aware of this, but largely gives zero fucks beyond the fact that Wax's ruse gives him greater access to government information. For as much as Spartan disapproves of what Grifter's getting up to, he's just as willing to use people and play with their lives in pursuit of his grand motives.

Yet, as I talked about elsewhere, Casey takes the "enlightened billionaire technocrats will save us" view here, which probably seemed quite intelligent in 2002, but looked laughable five years ago when I wrote that first post, and isn't any less so now. Clean, non-fossil-fuel based energy sources are a good thing, but as Spartan is leveraging capitalism for all its worth, there is still the matter of people needing jobs to have money to pay bills. He is putting a lot of people out of work, in a story which takes the viewpoint that governments are largely useless and more interested in protecting their own power, therefore unlikely to help those people.

Dustin Nguyen and Tom Friend are the penciler/artist team for the first 16 issues. Nguyen is a ways off from the more simplified, angular style he adopted on various Bat-books and Descender. You can see similarities in the shapes of characters' faces, but the work is closer to a hyper-detailed approach. Lots of little lines on faces. While there are a fair number of scenes with the same sorts of heavy shadows Sean Phillips favored, they still aren't as common in this volume, reserved for places behind the scenes. Private deals and plans, usually involving Grifter. Out in public, Spartan is Jack Marlowe, benevolent corporate bigwig. Buying ad time in the Super Bowl and buying movie studios and insisting they used Halo Corp cars in their movies. All still very manipulative and grabbing all the levers of power, but in a bright and aboveboard manner.

I'm coming to the conclusion I may be too cynical to properly enjoy this book.

While Phillips drew Spartan's silver business suit very differently from everyone else's clothes, emphasizing its alien origin (since it's part of what used to be Void), Nguyen tends to render it like a particularly shiny piece of clothing. Maybe because Spartan's had more time to get accustomed to it, to accept the benefits and the power as he has this idea of running a corporation. A suit fits him better now.

I don't know if Casey got editorial pressure or what, but the the books moves away from all the political maneuvering for the final arc, when Grifter pulls in a bunch of characters from the series (and controls Maxine's body remotely) to help rescue Zealot from the current leadership of the order she founded millennia ago. Duncan Rouleau is drawing the book as it returns to something closer to what the book was originally, and his work is a little wilder and more energetic than Nguyen. Nguyen can do wild-eyed emotion very well, but his violence tends to be rougher, more focused on how bruised and battered people get doing this stuff. Roueleau's seems closer to, "holy shit, that guy got his arm blown off!" Spartan does end up helping, but even then, he seems so damn irritated to have to do something.

Maybe they needed to program a little more loyalty into the guy.

Saturday Splash Page #31

"Business Casual Action Squad," in WildC.A.T.S. (volume 2) #17, by Joe Casey (writer), Sean Phillips (artist), Dan Brown (colorist), Richard Stsarkings and Saida Temofonte (letterers)

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.

Some People Have More Immediate Concerns Than World Saving

I was rereading Joe Casey and Dustin Nguyen's WildCats version 3.0 over the weekend. I don't think I'd reread them since I originally purchased them, but there's been a lot of other things to read.

Most of it revolves around the former warrior cyborg Spartan, having been put in charge of the Halo Corporation by its late founder (and leader of the WildCats back in their more extreme, Jim Lee drawn days), to improve the world. There's another thread in there about Grifter still being used to doing things how they used to do them, with bullets and cool one-liners, and struggling to adapt (or to avoid adapting).

Beyond the fact the thing ends before the Halo Corp. gets much beyond making themselves a big deal in the news and generically spooking the Powers That Be with their batteries that never run out, the biggest issue is it's a limited scope. It's admittedly difficult to buy into a story that argues some enlightened plutocrat is going to use his corporate resources to save the world where the governments have failed. OK, so the governments failing because they have too much invested in the status quo isn't hard to believe.

But the whole thing is very top-down, and ignores certain issues at the same time that it seems to be trying real hard to convince us how different it's being. Yes, batteries which last forever, and more critically, car batteries that function as fuel cells, eliminating the need for petroleum in vehicles, is a pretty big deal. We're told this is putting all other battery manufacturers out of business, and will presumably eventually do the same to a lot of automotive manufacturers. Halo Corp's factories are shown to be entirely automated. Left unmentioned, that a lot of people will be losing their jobs. No pages spent on anything Halo Corporation might be doing to help those people.

One might presume the well-meaning cyborg businessman has some ideas he will try to implement down the line, when he's finished buying product placement in big-budget action movies. I'm sure he's envisioning a world where people have their needs met, and don't have to worry about rent, or medical bills. But while he's busy with such important matters as placing an accountant in charge of a CIA front operation as a mole, all those unemployed folks still have bills to pay right now. And we clearly can't trust the incompetent, self-interested government to do anything for them.

A little surprised Casey didn't do anything with the government trying to fight a p.r. war. Condemn Halo's actions on news programs or through negative press from friendly outlets. Run lots of false information about negative effects. Instead they opted to try and assassinate the guy. Because I guess they were still operating in the old ways, like Grifter.

What Do You Do When There's No More Covert Action To Be Had?

I picked up four volumes of WildCats, 2.0 I guess, a few months ago, mostly because I was curious to see how it lead into version 3.0, the two trades of which I purchased when DC released them over the last couple years. Mostly, it's made me want to go back and reread version 3.0, now that I better understand how things got to that point, but I did have some other thoughts.

- The first volume does lay out the basic idea very well. All these various people were brought together to help fight this war against the Daemonites that's been raging across the universe for ages. Except they'd recently found out the war's been over for some time, and the powers that be simply took their sweet time tracking down all the remaining pockets of fighting to let them know. So the team members are trying to decide what to do next. And the answers are pretty varied. Grifter reverts back to old habits, Zealot decides it's a good time to clear up some loose ends, Voodoo doesn't really have anything to do, which makes her a bit more obviously adrift than some of the others, but she also seems more comfortable with her life than the rest.

- Spartan gets the most interesting task, being left an entire corporation to run as he sees fit, with only the basic idea to use it to help humanity. It's interesting to see him saddled with this, since I feel like he's the only member of the team that never really had a choice about fighting. The others were drafted, but he was literally built to fight Daemonite. So what does the android do when his purpose is no longer necessary? And while he clearly believes in the idea of using Halo to improve the world, I'm not sure he has any clue how to do so. It's something entirely outside his realm of experience, so we don't see him do anything with Halo. Most of what he does involves trying to help old teammates, or in one case, helping a cop try and get some new drugs off the streets. But he does that with superpowers, not business acumen. Joe Casey did something similar in his last storyline for Uncanny X-Men, except Archangel did use his money, rather than superpowers. I don't know if that's a case of Casey refining his approach by the time he got to Uncanny, or if he was just trying to underscore the limitations Spartan's dealing with.

- Which is where Noir, a weapons merchant, comes in. Lobdell introduces him in the first volume, as part of a fake weapons buy Spartan's holding. He winds up being hired to be the computer guy, but it's his ambition that sets things in motion for what happens in version 3.0. Because his goals are more mundane (money, power), he can see paths to exploit Spartan (as Jack Marlowe), with his loftier, more ambiguous goals, can't. Those plans are still limited in scope in Noir's hands, because his goals are limited, but he still provides a starting point no one else could.

- It's a nice touch that as Noir berates Spartan and Grifter for being so lacking in vision, he doesn't see that he's fallen into some old super-villain cliche. The double-cross, the big speech about his scheme, it's old-school Bond villainy.  I mean, death traps, idiot minions, not just killing the hero at the first opportunity? He prattles on, never realizing Spartan's letting him reveal his whole scheme, or suspecting that Grifter might be more resilient than he thinks. For all that Noir thinks they're locked in their ways, he ends up like most villains, his ego being his downfall.

- The conspicuous absence of Warblade. He shows up in a flashback story, and one character even comments on his absence, but other than that, he never shows up. He even gets cut out of a picture Dr. Stone has of the old team (well, you can see part of his arm, but otherwise he's out of the picture). I don't know if that's because someone else was planning to use him, or neither writer, first Lobdell and then Casey, had any plans for him. Maybe he adjusted better than the others, walked away with no regrets. Who knows.

- The team as a whole is highly unconcerned with civilian casualties. When Jacob Marlowe (team founder) is trying to draw out an old mistake of his named Kenyan, he basically lets the guy slaughter a casino full of people. Prior to that, he didn't do much to rein in Grifter when he was firing into a crowd of people at Kenyan or beating up cops who tried to arrest him. When Slaughterhouse Smith the 2nd goes on a rampage, there doesn't seem to be much concern for the dozens of women he killed just for having the last name "Marlowe". Heck, even when Maxine Manchester gets torched trying to take Smith down (he shoots fire out of his eyes), neither Spartan nor Grifter seem terribly concerned. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Grifter's a merc, and kind of an asshole. Spartan's an android who says he can't feel, and they both tried to keep her out of it, but still.

- I'm not sure whether I buy that bit about Spartan not being able to feel. At times, I can buy it. When he says he isn't sure whether he'll have Maxine repaired (she's a cyborg, heavily machine), well, it seems callous, but from a non-emotional standpoint, Maxine is kind of nuts. She was an anarchist in that looney tunes, burn everything sense, and giving her a robot body with machine guns and stuff is asking for trouble. At the same time, he said he wanted to exterminate Smith for what he did to Voodoo, which suggests he's feeling something (they used to be an item, apparently). And he's capable of surprise, because he was definitely stunned when Grifter told him Zealot was alive. He seemed angry when he saw that car chase on TV, angry enough to teleport out and stop it in broad daylight. Maybe that was a concession to fans wanting more action, and so Casey went with it so he could make Spartan deal with the fallout? I don't know.

- Travis Charest drew the first few issues, before it switched largely over to Sean Phillips (with a couple of issues drawn by Steve Dillon and Bryan Hitch in there). I prefer Charest's design sense to Phillips'. Charest's Kenyan seems more creepy and other worldly (the wide-brimmed hat with pupiless eyes peeking out from underneath helps), while Phillips' just looks like a guy in a suit with a gun. At the same time, some of Charest's page layouts were a bit confusing. He maybe ditches the panel borders a bit too much. Phillips doesn't go that route, so it's at least easy to tell what order things are happening in. Phillips does do some good, moody work. There's a bit in Spartan's confrontation with Slaughterhouse that evoked a real Darkseid vibe, which was very effective. Very spooky too. 'Pray that you have more to give.' Yikes.