Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Wild Worlds by Alan Moore On Alan Moore’s WildC.A.T.s. Alan Moore doesn’t even slum it like the rest of us do. Though some would regard the very thought as heresy, Moore has proven himself able, if not ecstatic, to churn out the scripts when necessity demands. It’d take an exceptionally generous heart to argue that his mid-nineties work for Image Comics’ WildC.A.T.s , for example, was consistently very much more than old rope. The dialogue’s often undercooked when not actively hackneyed, the plots so loose that the reader could imagine Moore scribbling out first draft one after another following weeks of sleepless nights communing with serpent-headed gods. In places, we can even see Moore lazily hanging his stories on the clichés of his own career, as if he were pastiching the very idea of being Alan Moore , or, more probably, pillorying those writers who’d regurgitated his influence in a shallow, sensationalist fashion. It was, according to the man himself as quoted in Gary Spencer Millidge’s Alan Moore: Storyteller , the result of the Bard of Northampton attempting and failing to gauge what the audience for Image books wanted. “I must have somehow misplaced my arrogance.” Millidge quotes him as saying. Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that Moore was in any way intensely committed to the super-books he produced for Image. A loss of faith and direction notwithstanding, the period saw Moore delivering work which, while superior to just about everything else in the superhero market, simply didn’t reflect the extraordinarily high standards his work had previously regularly attained. A journeyman Alan Moore script, no matter how competent, is simply no Alan Moore script at all. ALAN MOORE: WILD WORLDS. Alan Moore, writer of the top-selling graphic novels V FOR VENDETTA and WATCHMEN, returns with this new title starring some of the biggest names from the WildStorm Universe and beyond! This slam-bang title features a tale that pits the covert action team known as the WildCats against the demonic hero called Spawn! Plus, hard-hitting tales of Majestic, Voodoo, Deathblow and more! Community. See All. Fan Art Highlights: Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. We wanted to share with you some of our favorite fan art of the two love birds before their next heist! June's DC Book Club: DC Pride. Check out this month's installment of the DC Book Club to learn about all our Pride events throughout the month! The History of DCU Pride Characters & Creators. Every week, the DC History Club is adding new profiles spotlighting representation throughout DC's history. Tor.com. Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects. The Great Alan Moore Reread. The Great Alan Moore Reread: WildC.A.T.s. Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 35th installment. In the comic book industry, whenever anyone starts cranking out lists of “The Greatest Writers of All Time,” you’re likely to see a whole bunch of guys who have written a whole bunch of ongoing series for either Marvel or DC or both. Sure, there are some exceptions ​ Frank Miller is probably slightly better known now for his work on Batman or Sin City than he is for his seminal Daredevil run, and writers like Warren Ellis and Mark Millar tend to be known more for particular bursts of intentionally short-lived projects than for any extended ongoing work they’ve done in the past ​ but, overall, the deal with American genre comics is that they’re serialized, and the majority of the “big names” have become big names by writing those serialized, ongoing comic books. One glance at the Comics Should Be Good “Top 125 Writers Master List” and you’ll see what I mean. But while Alan Moore worked on some serialized back-up stories in Marvel U.K. magazines and produced some features for various anthologies, for the first decade of his career, by the time he had already been anointed Greatest Comic Book Writer Ever, Swamp Thing was his only example of traditionally-published monthly, ongoing comic book work. It’s not surprising that the iconoclastic Moore would have such an unusual bibliography, but it was decidedly unusual for its time, when there were even less opportunities to carve out a career writing limited series and graphic novels than there are today. Swamp Thing was Moore’s only “run” on an American comic book series. Until he started hanging around in the Image quarter of comic book town. And Jim Lee invited him in to WildC.A.T.s . WildC.A.T.s: Covert Action Teams #21-34 & 50 (Image Comics, July 1995 ​ Feb. 1997 & June 1998) Originally created by now-DC Co-Publisher Jim Lee (and his writing partner Brandon Choi), WildC.A.T.s was one of the first-round Image Comics series, and like the other comics in the initial line, it added pumped-up action conventions to traditional superhero archetypes. So Lee, who had risen to comic book prominence by drawing X-Men comics, created a new superteam book that featured not a wheel-chair bound leader, but an extremely short one. Not a stoic field commander with devastating eye blasts but a stoic field commander with devastating energy blasts. Not a butt-kicking psychic assassin but a butt-kicking warrior woman from outer space. Not a guy with metal claws snikt-ing out from the back of his hands but a guy with stretchy metal claws for hands. And so on. The characters were familiar enough to be comfortable, even as Lee and Choi set these superhero archetypes against the backdrop of a massive war between two alien races, the Kherubim and the Daemonites. In Lee and Choi’s comics, the heroes were Kherubim agents, working on Earth to oppose the Daemonite threat. They just happened to look a lot like characters who would have struggled with mutants rights and Brotherhoods of Evil, but they were actually robots and aliens, mostly. Eventually Choi gave way to writer James Robinson, and Lee moved on to generate more properties for what would soon become a massive Wildstorm line within the Image Comics cooperative. Then, with issue #21, Alan Moore was brought in. Moore originally planned to work with then-semi-regular WildC.A.T.s artist Travis Charest, a penciler in the Jim Lee mode who had apparently discovered the work of Moebius right around the time of his WildC.A.T.s run. But like many of the Wildstorm comics of the 1990s, the art side of things tended to be more of a team project, and while Charest would draw many of the best issues of Moore’s run on the series, he wouldn’t draw them all, and the radical change in artistic styles from issue to issue (immediately after Moore took over) didn’t help to establish much in the way of a consistent tone for the new take on the series. And Moore’s new take? Two parts, basically: (1) With the WildC.A.T.s team members off in space, a new team is formed, using some already- established Wildstorm characters and some original Alan Moore creations, and (2) The WildC.A.T.s, back on the Kheran homeworld, far from Earth, learn that the Kherubim/Daemonite war ended hundreds of years ago. Earth was such a remote outpost, no one had bothered to convey that message to them. Moore turned Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.s issues, in retrospect, into the superhero version of the story of Hiroo Onoda. Structurally, Moore’s 14-issue run (excluding the brief epilogue a year-and-a-half later) cuts between those two concurrent plots, while building toward a bigger story about betrayal from within. The original WildC.A.T.s team members return from space, emotionally scarred by what they’ve seen from the decadent post-war, politically corrupt Khera, and the two teams sort of reluctantly join forces to strike at the increasing menace from the criminal underworld. It would seem to be kind of a cliché plotline from Moore, a writer known for unorthodox choices, or at least for presenting ironic twists that readers might not expect. And that’s, ultimately, what he does here, as the superteam-vs.-supervillainous-underworld turns out to be a shell game, coordinated by the WildC.A.T. known as Tao, a Moore creation and the weakest member of the team. Tao ​ whose name stands for Tactical Augmented Organism ​ is an enigmatic member of the support staff. At best, he’s, as his name would suggest, a tactician who can help coordinate field work from the headquarters. Throughout Moore’s run, characters comment on Tao’s lack of powers, emphasizing his apparent weakness. Yet, in the end, he’s the real mastermind behind most of the trouble facing the team. He wants to control them all like puppets, and it’s clear that he does have significant powers. He is a master manipulator, who can persuade almost anyone of almost anything. From a distance, it’s not dissimilar from the role Ozymandias played in Watchmen , and it wouldn’t be very difficult to draw parallels between the two. Both characters serve the same basic purpose in their respective stories, though Moore telegraphs Tao’s possibly sinister nature a bit more clearly in WildC.A.T.s while Ozymandias was more of a surprise reveal in Watchmen .