For those not in the know, WildC.A.T.S was one of the Image launch titles, and certainly feels like it. This one was Jim Lee's baby, a decidedly X-Men like book that combines covert opts with crazy space aliens.
For all the jokes I could make about it, it's not a TERRIBLE book. Lee's firing on all cylinders, the plot is serviceable, and the concept is... well, it's right in Lee's wheelhouse and that works. It's not as outlandishly bad as say Youngblood of off putting as Wetworks, but it has one major flaw: it's generic.
It's no wonder this book went through so many permutations and has yet to have one truly stick, there's nothing about it that really sets it apart from anything else on the stands. In this way, it was very indicative of the 1990s, where there were spats of books that were high energy, well drawn, but lacked the originality that could really engage a reader and create a long-lasting franchise.
It's never a bad thing to invoke thoughts of other works in your own, but it's never a good thing when you can't distinguish your own work from that which inspired it.
And really, that's WildC.A.T.S' problem: it feels just like an X-Men spinoff of the time.
In reading the first issue I was just struck at how dull and unoriginal the book was. It did hit the ground running and with a well-thought out plot, so kudos for that, but otherwise I forgot about it as soon as I finished reading it and that's never a good thing.
Wait a minute. Maybe that was the plan all along: Make people forget about once they finished it, so they would keep buying the same copy over and over again. But who would be dumb enough to do a thing like that...
I take it all back, that's downright genius!
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