Time once again for WildStorm to have another stab at exhuming an old property whose audience long since moved on.  This time, it's WildCATS: Nemesis, a six-issue miniseries presumably intended to keep the characters on the shelves until the next relaunch in 2006.

WildCATS has been through all manner of different interpretations over the years.  It started off, back in the early nineties, as a typical early Image title, where Jim Lee was the selling point and it really didn't matter a damn what the plot was.  It's been an Alan Moore book, a more conventional superhero team book, and most recently, under Joe Casey, it was a satirical take on big business.

Although Casey's run got a lot of good reviews, like the other Mature Readers books from WildStorm, the sales weren't exactly stellar.  So it's hardly a surprise that WildStorm are trying a different tack, going back to a much more conventional direction.  Nothing necessary wrong with taking a step back at this point.

But god, this is dull and depressing stuff.  It's about as unexciting as you could hope to get from a technically competent creative team.  Nemesis, an old enemy of Zealot, returns.  So the WildCATS fight her for half an issue.  Then there's an extended flashback to the year 995.  Nemesis meets Zealot, and they fight for the rest of the issue.  What we have here is a story that is almost challenging in its sheer lack of content.

To be fair, the story itself isn't the most depressing thing in the issue.  That would be the ludicrous house ad for the first issue of Wraithborn, which features an absurd "bad girl" drawing straight out of 1992, and promises a "special glow-in-the dark variant cover of issue #1."  Once I'd finished laughing at it, I couldn't help but be depressed at the thought that WildStorm, which was at least trying over the last few years, has basically thrown in the towel and gone back to a policy of publishing crap.  (Although in fairness, they also shipped Winter Men #2 this week, which certainly doesn't fall under that heading.)

I'm sure there must be a hardcore of old-school WildCATS fans who'll be happy to see a book like this, but I can't imagine that there's very many of them left.  For everyone else, this is a book of no conceivable interest - not technically inept, but with nothing new to offer.

Rating: C-

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