Wildstorm Comics

[Darthfury78]

Who feels that Jim Lee made a terrible mistake in selling his company to DC Comics rather than stepping down as publisher to concentrate on illustrating at the time. I always loved the old Wildstorm Comics format; but when I learned the Jim had sold the company, I thought that it was the beginning of the end as DC Comics would kill off the brand slowly as Marvel had done the Malibu Comics.

Now that Wildstorm is just a shell of its former self, I would if there's someone out there would consider buying the company back from DC Comics and make the brand independent once again to how it was before it got sold in 1998?

Afterall, the founder of Saban Entertainment bought back the rights to the Power Rangers from Disney while and investment company got the remains of Valiant Comics from the bankrupt Acclaim Entertainment. I never felt that DC was ever going to do right by Wildstorm at all. The Wildstorm Brand had a lot of untapped potential if only Jim Lee had seen that before selling off his company.

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2010/09/...led-wildstorm/

[Darrin Kelley]

Jim Lee has pretty much run Wildstorm into the ground before DC bought it out. And the books that were produced after that buy-out were nowhere near the quality of storytelling they had been when Wildstorm had been independent. It had been dying a slow death for a long time.

Then the New 52 appeared. DC trying to incorporate Wildstorm into its main line universe. And that just didn't work. The tones were way different from each other in the first place. As was the type of storytelling. And the mash-up, as expected, was not kind to the Wildstorm properties or to DC.

Would I like to see Wildstorm as a separate company again? Yes. Because I was a pretty big fan of their books. Much of what they produced made me very happy.

But the Wildstorm properties deserve to be their own thing.

[Deniz Camp]

And the books that were produced after that buy-out were nowhere near the quality of storytelling they had been when Wildstorm had been independent. It had been dying a slow death for a long time.

That simply isn't true. The Golden Age of Wildstorm was right there in the midst of DC's ownership; Ellis' Planetary and Authority to set the tone, Ennis' Mag. Kev, Casey's Wildcats 3.0, Alan Moore's America's Best line, Brubaker's Sleeper, Ellis' plethora of creator owned stuff (Global Frequency, fo). Previous to that it was an obvious superhero rip off universe, brimming with cliches and devoid of inspiration. Post DC purchase it became THE place for Mature, action-oriented scifi books (in direct contrast to the more ponderous, philosophical and mystical bent of Vertigo).

Certainly there reached a point of decline, as Marvel began taking a lot of that talent first into the Ultimate Universe (and to a lesser extent, MAX Universe) and then into their mainstream books, and again with the rise of true creator owned material. But the just-bought Wildstorm was far, far better than the drek they were putting out; it became a place of experimentation and innovation, of genre diversity and content diversity. It was built on the back of editors like John Layman, Scott Dubnier and Ben Abernathy.

Modern Image, though often equated with Vertigo, actually has much more in common with the Wildstorm of that era.

[Dark-Flux]

Depends on what you mean by mistake. Cos im pretty sure it worked out well for Jim Lee. :P

But yeah, id agree that the golden age of Wildstorm was pretty much around the time and into the purchase by DC.

I think its entirely possible that Wildstorm could flourish under DC. It just needs commitment. Good creative teams, freedom from the tight editorial control that plagued the early days of the New 52, and probably to be their own universe/imprint again.

[Darthfury78]

Depends on what you mean by mistake. Cos im pretty sure it worked out well for Jim Lee. :P

But yeah, id agree that the golden age of Wildstorm was pretty much around the time and into the purchase by DC.

I think its entirely possible that Wildstorm could flourish under DC. It just needs commitment. Good creative teams, freedom from the tight editorial control that plagued the early days of the New 52, and probably to be their own universe/imprint again.

I think that DC should sell Wildstorm with conditions that all of its characters are back to how they were before DC purchased the brand, meaning that the new owners can not use anything that Wildstorm had used during the DC era. It might be better for the brand to be independent once again.

Did you know that there was a Gen 13 cartoon in the works(Produced by Disney) around the time of the sale of Wildstorm to DC? Because of that, the movie was never distributed in the USA, which was scheduled for release prior to DC buying Wildstorm. This is the part where I said that Jim Lee made a mistake in selling his company to DC, which is own by Time Warner, who are Disney's competitors.

[Dark-Flux]

why would you want to get rid of all the DC era stuff? Planetary, Authority, DV8, WildCats 3.0, Kev, Tom Strong, Promethea, Top 10, Sleeper etc...
Thats Wildstorms best stuff...

[Cyberstrike]

That Gen-13 movie is on Youtube and it sucks. The animation is crap the voice acting is subpar at best and awful at worst (how the f*** do make John DeLancie sound boring) and it's tone is all over the map.