WildCATs Proposal

WildCATs WorldStorm Proposal

by Grant Morrison

THE CONCEPT

I hate writing these things and tend to get my best ideas on the run, but hopefully this rough outline should give you some idea of the direction I’d like to take the book in and give us something to talk about.

First off, having heard the phrase for decades, I really started getting into the idea of “adult superheroes” and what that might really mean. Superhero comics are often described as “adolescent power fantasies,” so I began to wonder what an “adult power fantasy” comic would be like.

This doesn’t necessarily mean “adult” in terms of sexual imagery or swearing, although there may be some element of that, but adult in terms of approach. If the “adolescent” approach to superheroes is typified by gaudy, individualistic dress styles, brawls and confrontations, peer loyalty and conformity…what might we get if we take an “adult” approach and imagine superheroes exemplified by discretion, taste and experience?

Proceeding from that, what I’d like to do is take the concept of a “covert” action team literally again and really explore what that might mean and how it could make the Wildcats very different from any other current superhero team book.

THE CHARACTERS

SPARTAN

The smartest cyber-synthetic lifeform in the galaxy has chosen to make his home on the planet Earth, which could be good news or bad for the rest of us. That’s mainly what this story is all about.

The super AI, Hadrian AKA Spartan was heading up the revolutionary Halo Corporation expansion when we last saw him in Joe Casey’s Wildcats 3.0, so I’d like to continue the exploration of Hadrian as super-businessman but take it to the next level—an alien corporate machine with mankind’s best interests at heart and some far-reaching plans. It’s Hadrian who has created and marketed artificial superheroes and who completely rethinks the whole hero concept with his new‘adult’approach.

Previous “change the world” comics like The Authority have had to deal with the inevitable question, “What human has the right to make decisions about what other humans need?” This time, it’s not humans judging others or deciding their politics are better than someone else’s politics—it’s an objective, super-smart machine, observing, calculating, and coldly coming to conclusions about what humans need.

Whether or not Hadrian turns out to be a good, loving “father” or another misguided patriarch remains to be seen.

VOODOO

Voodoo returns to the new team reluctantly and is mainly drawn into Hadrian’s schemes because he’s the electric lover she can’t live without. Sexy, smart and quite possibly humanity’s last hope in the body of a hot dancer.

GRIFTER

I’m seeing him more like Mickey Rourke’s Marv in Sin City. He’s ultraviolence on legs, monumental, scarred and unstoppable. And as the body count gets higher, the jokes get darker. Grifter’s the book’s comedian and one-man slaughterhouse.

MAJESTIC

I’m playing Majestic almost as a mercenary superhero—a guy who’s seen and done everything a superhero could imagine doing—from the beginning of time to the end and into other dimensions and beyond. And like an old soldier, he can’t stop fighting monsters, saving worlds, challenging evil wherever he can find it. He travels the galaxy righting wrongs, while growing increasingly more existential and alienated, pondering the great questions of life, death and being.

ZEALOT

Zealot has retired to a Coda nunnery on the planet Khera, now overrun by Daemonites and abandoned by the Kherans. I’d like to rekindle her relationship with Grifter but fill it with so many complications it makes Rogue and Gambit look like underachievers.

LADYTRON

Ladytron aka Maxine Manchester or Mad Maxine, as I may end up calling her because she’d NEVER have named herself after a Roxy Music song OR a young glam noir band, is in an orbiting prison for superhuman criminals when we meet her again in issue #2. It’s not long before she’s caught up in a jailbreak and offered a chance to redeem herself by Hadrian.

THE VILLAINS

GAMORRA

Kaizen Gamorra recreated in a cyborg body, held together by technology and hate. He is our Bin Laden figure. A violent ideologue holed up in a secret location, from which he sends out threats and zealous young suicide men.

Gamorra Island itself has been bought by several world corporations, including Halo, and is being converted to functions as a kind of World Business center. This is not to the liking of the Island’s previous despotic owners, and the deposed and dying Gamorra, along with his sons and his faithful warriors, have declared all-out terrorist war on capitalism and democracy. They want to restore Gamorra to mythic glory and overthrow their decadent enemies. Because they represent one of the very few alternatives to global monocapitalist thinking, this dated, bloody credo has found a surprising number of converts.

HELSPONT

Helspont has risen once more to lead his hordes. We learn he is a kind of compound intelligence—when Daemonite population levels rise to a sufficient level, they trigger the emergence of a powerful central mind, a controlling intelligence which takes a synthetic body of flame and metals. Helspont is the mass mind of the Daemonite race, containing all its intelligence and knowledge.

THE MISSION STATEMENT

So, this is the super team as Mission: Impossible, featuring a group of super-specialists with enough money and power to do ANYTHING it takes to achieve their ends. With the most incredible resources at their disposal and some of the smartest, most powerful heroes in their ranks, the Wildcats work from the shadows, unknown, unsuspected, to change their world for the better.

Originally found at the Wildstorm Resource Wiki