Off the bookshelf

I spent a very large portion of my weekend reading thanks to a couple of things I picked up... something new, something old. Something downloaded.

Firstly JK Rowling has enough money as it is from her Harry Potter royalties. So I'll be brutally honest, I have no intention of buying any of the books... besides, I've spent enough on the DVDs anyway. I finished Sorcerer's Stone on Friday and got right into Chamber of Secrets.

As for stuff I did pay for...
Here's a funny thing. I actually own the first few issues collected in the Alan Moore saga of WildCATs. It got started at the worst of times and I was the reader who got away. See, ever since it started out, Jim Lee's WildCATS was accused of being a total rip on X-Men. Hell, even the adverts billed them as "mutant heroes" (mutant was a buzz-word back then). But I liked it anyway. Besides, this was Jim Lee's artwork, we were talking about. When he left his flagship book, it was a little hard to swallow, but Travis Charest was the hot new kid and he had that hype-detail style that sort of looked like Jim Lee, but also a little different. It was cool. And I stuck with it for another few issues.

But here's the catch... this was around the time the 90's comics scene was gearing up for its huge bust. Even my local comics store in small town French Quebec was making a tactical withdrawal. So it was harder and harder for me to find Wildstorm comics regularly. In the end, I was traveling to Montreal to collect the issues of that made up the first major crossover, Wildstorm Rising. And here was the big problem, art styles varied wildly between the titles. And quite honestly, I didn't like most of it. In fact, only an issue or two into the post-Wildstorm Rising issues, Travis Charest wasn't even doing the art anymore.

It's really too bad because here we are 15 years later before I finally got over that hump. DC has seen fit to reprint the entire Alan Moore scripted run (issues 21 thru 34) in one massive collection. And I'm sad to report, if I had stuck with the series just one or two more issues in, I would've had quite a trip 15 years ago. It's no difficult argument to make that this was the run that turned Wildstorm around and changed WildCATs from being the accused X-Men clone into its epic that would spawn ground-breaking material like The Authority.

My other collected edition that I read straight through this weekend was the new collection of the first arc for Dynamo 5. Captain Dynamo was a one-off character who showed up from time to time in the Image Universe. He figured into an early issue of Noble Causes as a token Superman-clone, but it wouldn't be too long (a couple of years by my count) before Jay Faerber would take that clone and make him into a cheating bastard. Enter a team made up on illegit kids. Yes, you read that right... this is a team of all the half-siblings that take up the slack when a father they never knew kicks the bucket.

And it's freaking hilarious the stuff that happens to them. The kids are written as kids with concerns I distinctly remember I had when I was teenager. But here they're dealing with the mysteries surrounding their father and the government agents after them. All of which is a good thing, because despite how much I love the art style (which mimics the style in the pages of Noble Causes)... well, I can't stand some of the character designs. I mean, some of the costumes just don't make any sense. Take the African-American girl who flies - she's the one who probably needs the most secure uniform... but she's also the one wearing a plunging neckline that looks like it could slip off her shoulders in mid-flight.

Image did another thing right: they gave this collection an introductory price of only ten bucks. Hey, that makes perfect sense to me.