It's a quiet week for new titles.  There's a new Demon miniseries out, but I'm honestly not interested.  CrossGen have started a pirate title, if you like that sort of thing.  And Todd Nauck launches his curious gimmick book, WildGuard.

Remember that X-Statix storyline about a rival team called O-Force, who'd been formed out of a superhero version of Pop (or, if you must, American) Idol?  Well, this is the same sort of thing - a miniseries about a superhero team being formed by reality TV show.  500 will enter, only five can win.

The big idea is that while Nauck is picking four of the five himself, readers are invited to vote for the fifth member on the WildGuard website.  Of course, Nauck isn't making all 500 available for votes; he's sticking to a smaller selection of 46, who are presumably the ones that'll make it to the final round.  And the results will be revealed in issue #6, with the roster making their way into the next miniseries.  (If the reader-voted character gets killed in that storyline, you may take it that you got it wrong.)

It's shameless gimmickry, of course, but it's got Nauck publicity in TV Guide, which won't do him any harm.  And the book is good fun; it knows that this is a ridiculous idea, and makes no effort whatsoever to persuade us otherwise.  The real superheroes - the Ultra Mega Super Five, who haven't actually had five members since 1974 - turn up near the end to mock the contestants.

To give Nauck his due, he's managed to fill his story with 500 characters - most of them non-speaking extras, of course - and keep the important ones distinctive.  When you've got that number of characters in superhero costumes wandering around, it can't be easy to produce enough distinctive designs without abandoning the superhero template altogether.  And to be sure, some of Nauck's characters are deliberately crap characters.  Most of them are obviously subpar superheroes, but if he's looking to set up a regular cast who'll be completely out of their depth from the word go, that makes sense.

The downside is that the book's a little lacking when it comes to plot; the contest gives it some structure, but it really does come down to an endless succession of characters being introduced and getting a couple of lines of dialogue to establish themselves - more if there are obvious plans for them.  This is fine where the characters have cute gags to establish themselves - and many of them do - but some seem to be intended as more straight characters, and the torrent is a bit overwhelming.  And the dialogue's a bit stagey in the opening pages, although it does improve as it goes on.

Still, the whole package is surprisingly good fun.  It's a novelty act, undeniably, but it makes no bones about that.

(Oh, and in case anyone else is wondering, the title is meant to be a pun on "wild card.")

Rating: B+

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