When Image launched oh so many years ago, I passed on all the WildStorm books. I didn't try them in earnest until Jim Lee brought Alan Moore and Warren Ellis on board to kick up the quality of the writing and then sold the whole kit and caboodle to DC. Even then my interest plummeted any time the word "daemon" appeared.

Hoping for a new Authority, I thought I'd give this reboot a try, but it seems to be going all in on daemons and throws in the equally dull concept of super secret intelligence agencies fighting amongst themselves not so secretly. Individual pages are mostly fine, thanks in part to the fine art, but at the end of the book I didn't particularly care about any of the people or their problems. But it wasn't bad, I suppose, and my library seems to have the entire series available, so I'll probably come back to this in a few weeks. ( )

I pretty much missed the entire Image launch back in the day, as I'd stepped away from comics. So, WildC.A.T.s and all the others? Nope, no idea what they were about.

In the almost thirty years since, I've come back around to comics, and mostly fallen in love with a few writers, such as Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Terry Moore, Donny Cates, and most recently, Tom King. I'll pretty much give anything these writers toss out, and rarely have I been disappointed (okay, aside from the recent discovery of Ellis' personal...um...grooming...habits...what a dick).

Regardless, I picked this up solely due to Warren Ellis writing it. And when Ellis is on with his science and tech, dude is on.

Unfortunately, he's waaaay waaay off this time. I know he's trying to jumpstart an entire comic universe, while also laying down elements of both current and future stories, but in the meantime, he sacrifices comprehensive storytelling for tech gobbledygook.

The main story of Angie Spica's sudden appearance as the Wildstorm Universe's Iron Man, but instead of running the show, she's pretty much running away from the show, is a good one. Unfortunately, Ellis throws characters that literally have nothing to do with the story at the reader just because they'll be needed down the line somewhere. And the rest don't get enough screen time for us to really get to know them as well as we should.

This is universe-building as speed dating. Doesn't work.

One star for Warren, four stars for the beautiful art. ( )

I don't really have the full background knowledge of Wildstorm to parse all of this, but it has a certain weirdness to it that I really enjoy. I'm probably hoping for too much for Ellis to tone down the violence and make the characters a bit richer, but this was a pretty fun read. A big summer blockbuster of a comic. ( )