Michael's Long Box: WildC.A.T.s Sourcebook #1 (1993, WildStorm)

Source: ComicbookDB.com

---

I prefer to use my own scans when possible, but in the case of WildC.A.T.s Sourcebook #1, I had to defer to ComicbookDB. As you can probably tell from the image, this book has a silver chromium cover enhancement, which doesn't scan well at all. Even the image from CBDB doesn't do it justice, but it looks a darn sight better than anything I was able to cobble together after wrangling with both the book and my scanner, so there you have it. Every other image in this article comes from my own scans.

---

WildC.A.T.s was Jim Lee and Brandon Choi's initial offering to readers from the newly-formed Image Comics. Presented and published under Lee's WildStorm imprint within the company, it was their contribution to the superhero team genre, similar to what Rob Liefeld offered with Youngblood. Readers loved the book, but Lee and Choi quickly realized their brand of storytelling had created a twisted labyrinth of characters, all of whom had confusing and insane backstories. Trying to to mitigate reader confusion and willing to capitalize on the burgeoning early 90's comic explosion, Lee and Choi along with writer Jeff Mariotte and a whole host of Image-stable artists, put together this sourcebook.

The idea was sound: to give customers a one-stop shop to get all their questions answered about the characters inhabiting the new WildStorm universe, including their code-names, real names, affiliations, backgrounds, powers, and other tidbits of information. While a fine idea in theory, the execution unfortunately leaves something to be desired as on almost every page, the artwork clashes with the text in such a way that the art always wins. The end result is that most entries are difficult, if not impossible, to read, and the problem crops up on the very first page:

Notice how hard the blue text is to read when placed against the brownish-purple backdrop of Delphai's cloak. Look to the lower-right corner and see how the white text gets completely lost in the artwork. There's no excuse for this kind of slapdash, devil-may-care attitude when it comes to layouts. What's equally frustrating though is to see areas in the book where it was handled correctly. Zealot's entry, for instance, is perfectly readable thanks to the dark text restricted to the white space of the page:

Incidentally, take a look at Zealot's vital statistics: she's six feet tall and weighs 120 pounds. Talk about unrealistic depictions of women in comics... Granted she's an alien, but she's also supposed to be one of the greatest warriors in the world and "superhumanly strong". I shouldn't be able to wrap my hands entirely around the waist of someone capable of killing me using only her earlobes and the backs of her knees.

When it's actually readable, the WildC.A.T.s Sourcebook is a useful reference for readers wanting a quick run-down of the heroes and baddies that comprise the title. It was important at the time of its release, because the WildC.A.T.s universe was trying to bloat itself up to a cast the size of your average DC or Marvel superhero team book, with a diverse array of good guys and bad guys, but without the slowly-built universe enjoyed by those studios where readers learned who was who over the course of decades, not months.

When people complain about giant barriers to entry in the comic book field, they're thinking about stuff like this where you need to know everything about everybody before the works make sense. Thankfully Jim Lee and Jeff Scott Campbell were able to reign in this universe-building tendency when it came to the launch of Gen 13, which gave us a more manageable group of protagonists and opponents to keep track of.

---

While the introduction says this is the first of what will become many entries in the series, WildStorm only published one other volume of the WildC.A.T.s Sourcebook series in 1994, although later sourcebooks covering other WildStorm books and characters continued to appear throughout the 90's, with the company finally deciding on a handful of WildStorm Universe annuals, the last of which appeared in 2009 after DC acquired the imprint. Like much of what Image produced during the 90's, they're worth very little on the second-hand market because of how many were produced (I picked up a six-issue bundle of the various Image sourcebooks for a dollar back in 2010), and their now-dated nature makes them interesting only to the historian or collector looking for an easy way to get character backgrounds without having to wade through dozens of different books looking for the answers.

Fortunately by the time WildC.A.T.s Sourcebook #2 came out, WildStorm had fixed their layout problems by utilizing text boxes and coordinated backgrounds to ensure every entry was readable, so the problems really only plague this first volume. Still, it's one more example of everything wrong, with 90's comics: their hearts were in the right place, but in 1993 the experience and technique was still lacking.

And I love it anyway. :)