I know my way around Comic Books. I've had a Comic Book Store since 1992 and I've read since then around 15-20 issues per week, mostly to be able to sell those titles to my customers and to make them fall in love with the stories so they become avid readers and thus, avid buyers.
This is a new section of my blog where I'll make some comic book reviews and recommend some titles to anyone reading my entries.
Neil Gaiman once said that comic books are sold through graphic art and are remember because of the stories... or how they say, love comes through the eyes,
In the 80's, Marvel Comics was supportede basically by mutant issues sells; the Avengers were relegated to the background and Spiderman was struggling to be at the same level as the X but still up there.
By the end of the 80's those sales were basically made by young and talented artists that revolutionized the way of telling a story graphically.
These illustrators hadn't reach their full potential and Marvel already owed them their soul: Todd Mcfarlane and Erik Larsen in the pages of Spidermn; Rob Liefeld, Marc SIlvestri and Jim Lee in the tX-men titles, Jim Valentino in Guardians of the Galaxy... and although Marvel owed them a lot, the reward system, credit for the work and other legal and economic issues that ruled in the comic industry (DC and Marvel) were unfair, so much that Jack Kirby, Jerry SIegel, Joe Shuster and many other creators were and would be for many more decades, the real victims of the story.
It is from this context that these creators decide to resign one day altogether and launch their own editorial that would allow them to publish and own their characters, the stories, the art and the names.
That's how IMAGE comics is born in 1992. Every artist established their own studio, brand, stamp and identity, all of them in a different in-story universe.
That's how the next story is born...
== JIM LEE'S Wild CATs (Covet Action Teams) ==
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Wildstorm is the name that Jim Lee picked for his universe; Todd McFarlane called it The Golden boy (because it is the one creator that gave Marvel the most sales, the best behaved one, and the one that the studio would never believe would leave them to start their own brand).
Lee took the chance to be free in IMAGE and it could be taken as an X-men derived but, with a little help from people like Alan Moore this story would take it's own identity and would grow by its own merit until having a lot of mini series with some very interesting creative teams.
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The concept is: Beings with superhuman abilities defend a humanity that, if they knew they exist, would hate them or fear them. Taking the concept a little farther, the story is about a way between two intergalactic races that brought their battle to earth: the Kherubim and the Daemonites.
The Kherubim have human appearance and when they arrived to eart they bred a type of mixed alien and human form with powers. The Daemonites are grotesque so they use mind control powers and posses humans to walk among us.
It was based on this that the wildstorm universe was built, and with Wildcats Jim Lee dynamited the minds of many youngsters, myself included, with incredible designs, spectacular battles, secuences out of a dream... and much more... it revolutionized the form of telling a story with dinamic static images in a comic book.
