The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul

What on odd little project for DC to put out right now? In the midst of their world defining span of stories that began before Infinite Crisis and looks to continue well into Final Crisis, they put out what appears to be an old fashioned crossover with their DCU and Wildstorm characters. In this first issue, there’s no Superman Prime, Anti-Monitors, Monarchs or any of the silly stuff from Countdown. Now I know that the Wildstorm Universe has now been absorbed into being one of the 52 universes in the vast multiverse but even that’s not mentioned here. This starts off as a basic old fashioned multi-universe crossover with DC heroes popping up across the Wildstorm Earth. Now honestly, I wasn’t planning on picking this series up. Even with Keith Giffen involved as the writer, it looked just too generic, a by-gone relic of when these types of crossovers were (and probably still are) all sound and fury signifying nothing. And lets’ be honest, the Wildstorm Universe lost any luster it had years ago and is just skirting by thanks to Jim Lee’s massive fame. Flipping through the book at the comic shop, I happened upon a couple page sequence near the end of the book, featuring two characters from a personally enjoyed team that quickly convinced me that I needed to check this book out.

It’s boring to read that a book is all set up, isn’t it? Well, guess what this book is. Yup, that’s right. It’s all set up as Titans Tower pops up in the middle of the Wildstorm NYC, the JLA’s cave headquarters pops up in the Wildstorm Happy Harbor and an older version of the Legion of Super-Heroes clubhouse suddenly appears in the middle of a Russian field. Dreamwar reads like a watered down cross between DC and Wildstorm, leaning more to the Wildstorm side but delivering nothing interesting about any of the characters.

It’s almost hard to remember that at one point, Wildstorm had writers like Ed Brubaker, Mark Millar and Joe Casey trying to make The Authority and the Wildcats interesting. Giffen can’t do anything to make those characters even remotely interesting but honestly, I wonder how much he’s trying to here. Appearances by The Authority, Spartan and even the characters from Tranquility rely more on the reader having a previous knowledge and liking of those characters rather than trying to make them anything more than the third or fourth generation of watered down heroes that they really are.

Yet, as a DC fan (or junky, take your pick,) I’m intrigued enough with this issue to pick up the next couple of issues. As the DC characters begin popping up, Giffen focuses on the four main DC teams; the JLA, the JSA, the Teen Titans and the Legion of Super-Heroes. And he’s possibly focusing on some early incarnations of these teams. It’s unclear how young the JSA’s Green Lantern, Flash and Wildcat are thanks to the non-descript art of that sequence. Artists Lee Garbett and Trevor Scott bring cement this as a Wildstorm book, doing a cross between Jim Lee, Dustin Nyguyen and a little Humberto Ramos (remember him from D.V. 8?) on this book.

This issue is heavy on the plot set-up and light on any actual character development. Heck, hardly any of the proper DC characters have any dialogue. And as it is, Giffen strips down the plot so thin that only the die-hard fans can get anything out of it. I may be one of those fans and would recommend it to the like but there’s no way to easily recommend this book to a casual reader.

DC/Wildstorm Dreamwar #1
“Chimera Rising”
Written by: Keith Giffen
Drawn by: Lee Barbett and Trevor Scott
Colored by: Randy Mayor
Lettered by: Rob Leigh

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