This entry covers “Backlash” issues 21 through 23 by Sean Ruffner, Brett Booth, JJ Kirby, John Tighe, Saleem Crawford, Mark Irwin, Martin Jimenez, Tad Ehrlich, and George Davis.
We open with Marc reflecting on his recent past, having just recently found out he has not just a daughter, but a son, and also the death of his pal CyberJack. It’s a heavy load to carry, and it does result in him being a bit snippy at Amanda when she tries to talk to him. He eventually sees what a skell he is being and gives her a smooch and tells her that he’s cool, just a bit of a prick sometimes… you know, when things get heavy and you find you’re suddenly dad. Speaking of being a dad, his daughter Jodi is not only painting and singing Brandy songs, but also spying on her old man kissing his new lady. Jodi’s support of the relationship borders on hilariously creepy, but more than her pops getting some, Jodi is more interested in the pizza she just ordered, and hot damn the door bell just rang!
Unfortunately for Jodi’s hunger, there is no pizza guy. Instead at the door is Brawl and Homicide of the Chasers, with Gaze and Recoil near by. Brawl seems pretty laid back about it all, but Homicide is ready to go nuts… I mean, what’s in a name right? So of course a fight breaks out with Marc, Amanda, and Jodi defending their house from Homicide, Gaze, and Recoil, while Brawl is rolling his eyes waiting for everyone to just calm the damn down. Why? Because there’s nothing to fight over! Brawl and the Chasers team were sent by the government to offer Amanda her official pardon! It’s a get out of jail free card and the six of them almost brought the house down.
Meanwhile that crazy Egyptian alien lady Lilitu is sending a new group of supercreeps to hunt down Amanda and kill her, after she got a tip off of Amanda heading to DC for her pardon. Also in Dayton, Ohio, a young man named Quinten has just arrived home late, getting in trouble with his mother, and then disappearing in a flash of light… ominous!
But let’s get to Amanda’s pardon! Giovanni sends a helicopter to pick up Marc, Amanda, and Jodi and bring them to the PSI building. What’s PSI? Why it’s the Paranormal Search and Investigation arm of the US government. Their purpose, as driven by Giovanni, is to monitor and find any paranormal activity, or superpowered being, and get them aligned with helping the US public’s well being, or eliminate them. Ultimately this also extends to Marc, Amanda, and Jodi with Giovanni letting them know that the only way he could get Amanda pardoned and Marc out of hot water with the US government for springing Amanda from Purgatory Max in the first place, is to be supervised by him, and come work at PSI. While a bit upset about this at first, Marc comes around, ready to train the new recruits, just like in his old StormWatch days.
Oh, you want to hear about the actual pardon, not just the events leading up to it, and around it? Well, no big shakes. A bunch of government higher-ups start to question Amanda on what she knows about the Cabal as she clears her, and Marc’s, good names. This doesn’t last too long, because those creeps that Lilitu hired break in and start killing people. Eventually Marc breaks in and he helps Amanda save the day. So you know she’s extra pardoned now or whatever.
Now it’s time for a break! Marc, Amanda, and Jodi are headed to Death Valley in Nevada to meet up with some of the workers cleaning up the debris left by the crashed SkyWatch station. He’s on a mission from Giovanni to meet, get some particle accelerator blueprints, grab some stuff from CyberJack’s place and then go back to DC. Well, there’s a couple of hiccups in that plan. The first being a trucker named Brink Gilman hitting on Amanda, the other being Talos. Yeah, THAT Talos!
So while stopping at a truckstop diner to get some gas, food, and coffee, Amanda befriends a stuntman turned trucker named Brink. He’s hitting on Amanda pretty hard, but Jodi is turning it down as quickly as it crops up. See what I said about her being creepily into Marc and Amanda’s relationship? Meanwhile Talos has come to the diner and is attacking the staff! After a punch and a whipping from Marc, a kick from Amanda, and being set on fire by Jodi, Talos is finally taken down by Brink smashing into Talos with his truck. Giovanni suddenly shows up to take everyone home, gets and earful of anger from Marc before telling him that he doesn’t ever “know what a “Talos” is.” which is hilarious. Giovanni is one cold and hilarious guy!
Continuity Corner:
- Marc is mostly reflecting on the events of “Fire from Heaven” at the start of issue 21, while it’s pretty recent, it doesn’t seem like it’s immediately recent, so I gave it a little breathing room between the event and these issues.
- Not sure why Jodi was de-aged so suddenly. She goes from being around 16ish to a solid 12 years old. It was pretty jarring when I was kid reading these for the first time, as I’d just seen her flirt w/ Bobby during “Fire from Heaven” and thinking “awww,” to now seeing her so much younger and wondering if Bobby should be on a list.
- Giovani drops the name of “The Puritans” as a crazy secret government group for the first time in WildStorm comics! It’ll be a bit of time before we see them in the pages of “WildC.A.T.s” but this was a neat set up!
- We’ll catch back up with Quentin from Dayton, OH in “Backlash” issue 24 as the subject of Marc’s first assignment from PSI.
At the end of issue 23 we see Brink spying Talos’s helmet thinking that the night was wild, but that he enjoyed it. Also with out a truck he thinks “Hmm.. maybe…” but nothing ever comes of it. Where’s my book w/ Brink running around trying to right wrongs wearing that Talos helmet and using his stuntman training? I’d check that out!- According to the book it’s only been 3 months since SkyWatch crashed into the desert… uh… that was in issue #25 of volume on of “StormWatch”… even accounting for the time travel that still works out to be more right? “StormWatch” volume one was on issue 39 by now! I know in comics time it’s still compressed from real time, but for it to only have been 3 months? Yeah, I don’t think so. One part of me would have wanted to push this issue out a bit, but the 3 months since SkyWatch crashed thing makes it seem like it’s not soon enough!
- Also, with Jodi being placed in boarding school by issue 23’s end, and the cast being fully relocated to Washington DC, we have set up the new status quo for this book going forward, might as well keep this “re-tooling” arc together.
NEXT: “Grifter” volume two issue 7 by Steven Grant, Matt Broome, Troy Hubbs, and Wendy Fouts
Where to Find These Stories
Our first story concerns the DV8 kids sitting around telling the grossest things they’ve ever experienced. Whoever has the least gross story has to drink an unholy concoction of various liquids from about the penthouse. This “half” issue is more a less an excuse from some gross out humor from Frostbite, Sublime, Evo, Powerhaus, and Copycat. Each story escalates until we get to Copycat, and before she can think of one Sideways Bob pops in to see what the game is about. And if it is gross stories you want, Bob has them for days. He tells so many the kids eventually beg him to stop. To that Bob declares that he is the winner, and that the winner makes a new rule. His rule is that all 5 of the kids have to split the bowl full of gross liquid at the center of the table as Sideways Bob hands out straws to the DV8 kids.
In issue 5 we have all the kids, including Threshold and Bliss on a mission to steal some teleportation device from some Japanese inventors. The Japanese firm was supposed to create new this “teleplate” for StormWatch, but their new invention also created what amounted to “free energy” which is why they probably won’t hand it over to StormWatch. It’s also why Ivanna wants it.
Where is Copycat? She’s seeing herself in an endless white void. In case you forgot, Copycat has several different personalities that rattle around in her head. They are all conversing amongst each other trying to find their escape.
The trading card story is pretty inconsequential but, it’s always fun to see if we can work in these side stories. The Gen13 kids, Lynch, and Anna go on a trip to the mall to unwind. They wind up at a virtual reality game arcade named Virtual Valley. The man running it, known as the Psimaster has the VR create whatever reality the player wants, but also records and sells the footage. Eventually Anna saves the day, because as a robot, she’s not generating the fantasy environment in the VR. She also wrecks Psimaster’s equipment, so he won’t be able to pull this little scam again!
Now, “Gen13: Interactive” is a proper book… but no less inconsequential, but man is this some pretty pretty art! The kids and Lynch go to the zoo, they all get separated from each other and then all the kids get captured by a being known as Panic. What Panic wants is a sample of Gen-Factor, and he thinks the kids are the way to get it.
Why all the silliness? Well the hook of this book was that the readers voted on what was going on in the book. Were all the suggestions to vote on wacky as hell? Some were, but others really weren’t. Like for our first situation with the VR, all of Caitlin’s options were silly asking if she should be turned into Snow White, a housewife with a sitcom, a nun, or a phone sex operator, while Roxy had the options to be a SEAL Team member, old maid, or Caitlin herself along with the winner of her becoming a Hooters waitress. So in some ways the ultimate silliness was up to those reading and voting, but there was enough craziness already built in.
Back to the story, we, through Lynch, find that Panic was an invention of Dr. Weir Dangle, a being made of nano-tech. Lynch contacts Dr. Dangle and they meet up and find Panic and the kids. What Panic wants is a mate, and while he can create duplicates of himself, problem that, is that they’re just duplicates, exact copies, no variations, just more of himself, not a mate. Panic was hoping that introducing some extracted Gen-Factor into the nano-tech one of his copies would introduce enough variance that a mate for him could be possible. Panic unfortunately found that the Gen-Factor of the kids was altered enough through the generational hand down, it was no good for his purposes. Seems only a pure Gen-Factor sample will do, and Lynch steps up to donates some of his, mostly just so we can get this whole debacle over with. Poor John Lynch, starts out in the WildStorm Universe as a single guy w/ a lost son, ends up being the dad to Bobby, TAO, and now apparently Panic’s partner.
Woah, what a book! It is jam packed with jokes. Quippy Cole Cash standard gags, cartoony over the top gags, dad joke level gags, everything and the damn kitchen sink! It’s actually a lot of fun. When I first read this as a kid, way back when, I didn’t know much of the Mask / Big Head other than the movie, but I still enjoyed it. I’ve read a lot more comics from “The Mask” line and know the character better, but what we get here is still a bit more of the sillier movie version, but with the destruction and some of the violence of the comic version.
While Cole is mainly trying to get Paul to calm down and see the error of his ways, that being causing WAY more destruction and chaos than the guns he’s protesting, they’re each being accosted by a common enemy. In this case it is a crew of one armed gun nuts known as the One Armed Bandits. And if that isn’t enough, they all have lost their left arms and refer to themselves as Right Supremists. So these jokers keep getting in Cole’s way of stopping Paul and reasoning with him, they keep riling Big Head / Paul up, causing Big Head to go even bigger in his crazed rampage of the Vegas strip. 
It’s a “Boy’s Night Out” for Evo and Frostbite. Both were pretty bored staying in the penthouse, not to mention kinda creeped out by Sideways Bob making out with Lucille that they leave and see what the neighborhood has to offer. Turns out it’s a lot, but none of it good! There’s street justice, rampant drug use, and a drive-by shooting. Not only that but there’s a girl named Memorie.
Meeting strange girls doesn’t always turn out so well. Take Powerhaus in our next story. Boy meets girl. Boy is convinced to go home with girl. Girl works for the CIA and this was all a set up to capture boy. Tale as old as time. Luckily Sideways Bob has a tracker that can read pain on each of the kids and sees that Powerhaus’s is going off and he’s nearing death. Evo, Frostbite, and Sublime decide, against Ivana’s objections, that they need to go save him, mostly in the spirit of friendship and team solidarity, but possibly to piss off Ivana. Bliss opts out because she realizes that she isn’t quite like the rest of the team and their connection, while Copycat joins the other kids, she feels much the same way as Bliss.
Uh oh! There’s SPBs in the city of Lincoln and it’s up to StormWatch Black (Jenny Sparks, Swift, and Jack Hawksmoore) to stop them! Wait, how did this happen, isn’t StormWatch kind of unwelcome in the United States currently? Well technically they’re still unwelcome, but Bendix is still out for revenge against America after the murder of Undertow. This is the revenge he was hinting at in the last issue to the President. Also, Bendis is a curious sort, and there’s some odd things going on with the police department in Lincoln, same odd things that are happening in New York and Bendix wants to see what Lincoln is all about and if there can be any correlation to New York City cops (even though I have it on good authority from the Strokes that they’re “no good.”)
Out next story opens with a plane crash. There’s more than 200 people dead East of the small English town of Little Brook, and StormWatch Prime (Winter, Hellstrike, and Fuji) is there to figure out what’s going on. Because it’s not just an average crash, seems as if people are mutating in it’s wake. In fact there’s a cloud of… something… headed towards the small town of Little Brook and that might end up being a huge spell of trouble! Trouble it was, too! Bunch of oddly mutated folks all over town! What in the fresh hell could cause this kind of horror?
Alright, time to catch up with Ivana’s reprobates from Project Genesis. It’s the DV8 kids and they’re really not as bad as we’ve been lead to believe from previous comics. In fact, most of them could be pretty stand up folks if it wasn’t for who’s in charge of them, that being Ivana, Threshold and to a lesser extent Bliss. And adding to the cast of unstable, unreliable, and inadequate guardians we’re introduced to Sideways Bob, a former I/O agent who is kinda nuts and doesn’t mind working for Ivana. He also has a mannequin head named Lucille for a girlfriend. While the DV8 kids aren’t too sure about him, it’s always good to have more muscle protecting them around.
Our second issue opens with the kids trying to get drinks at Clark’s. This of course doesn’t go well and after a dust up with Hellstrike from StormWatch a full-on bar brawl ensues. Lucky for the DV8 kids they find Sideways Bob outside with a limo and ready to kids to their next mission. There’s a group out in LA that goes by the name “Twist,” they’re Gen-Active and they are also lead by a former I/O agent. The DV8 kids (minus Threshold) head out to the desert to confront Twist. While everyone else is in the dark, Bliss was told by Ivana to try and recruit any of the Twist kids if possible. The rest of the kids make it clear to Bliss that Bliss keeping the rest of the kids out of the loop can’t lead to anything good.
Ok, here’s where one of two things happens, you either think “Thank goodness, WildStorm is bringing in some more great creators to make all their books awesome and somewhat challenging” or “Goddamn it WildStorm, what were you thinking? Why did you ruin StormWatch? This is the beginning of the end for the entire line!” I admittedly fall into the first camp, but I also must add, after feeling burn out from “Fire from Heaven” I never picked up this book as a kid. I had been a “StormWatch” loyalist, but after “Fire from Heaven” and the uneven issues prior to that I did not go on. In fact, I pretty much only continued to pick up “WildC.A.T.s” and “Gen13” after this, because of a shrinking budget due to going to local concerts, trying to date girls, and I dunno… late ’90s teen-ager-y stuff, I don’t have to explain myself you… On to the book!
Another change is that all remaining StormWatch personal are given teleport fetishes for direct teleportation… neat! Speaking changes we have Synergy… sorry, I’m just going to call her Christine from now on… we have Christine letting Swift know that back when Swift was activated, she wasn’t fully activated, just enough to get her seedling powers jump-started. Now it’s time for her full activation which now includes full on extra wings, just not wings under her arms. But let’s get to some action, ok?
Meanwhile, back in America, newly jobless Undertow is bummed. First off, his mom got him that job and he just lost it, and secondly, where is he going to live? While he’s able to stay at his UN accommodations indefinably, I can’t imagine that would feel comfortable for long. Well, he doesn’t have to worry much about that, because as soon as he opens the door the whole apartment explodes! Poor Undertow never had a chance, but his death will not remain a mystery, Bendix puts Hellstrike, Fahrenheit and Hawksmoor on the case to find out who killed him. Turns out, it was domestic terrorist who hate the United Nations! Fahrenheit manages to grab the security guard who was a part of letting the bombers in, and he get handled over to Bendix. Bendix extracts the information from the guard leading them to the bombers, which Fahrenheit, Hellstrike and Hawksmoor capture. Bendix takes the bomber’s bodies and literally throws them on the desk of the President of the United States! Bendix sees it as an act of aggression against the UN and StormWatch and takes it as a message saying StormWatch is no longer safe or wanted in America, and they will officially steer clear. But of course Bendix says it all menacingly in his menacing way. Like I said, he’s a total super tough guy now!
This is way more of a JLA book with the WildC.A.T.s guest starring. And not even all of the WildC.A.T.s! For whatever reason, Warblade & Spartan are left out. Sure Savant is still healing from the Crime War, so she can’t be there… my only other guess is that Spartan and Warblade were fighting some of the other super-villians known as the Seven Deadly Sins in another area when the JLA landed in the WildStorm Universe and took the 5 that were closest. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
So now the JLA and the WildC.A.T.s are in the same place and… ugh, it’s time for a superhero fight… at least Cole is as over it as I am. Why even recap it, they beat on each other until they talk enough to find out they are not enemies and they work together. I guess after talking to the Mercs during the Crime War and seeing how it stopped a lot of the fighting, Cole decided to try that strategy again. After everyone else figures out that they don’t need to be throwing punches, Void surmises that lot of the dimensional disturbances that are riling up these bad guys just might be alleviated if the WildC.A.T.s help the JLA defeat Epoch, because one collapsing timeline could do a lot of damage! Void and the Green Lantern (for the record it’s Kyle) manage to find away to ride a wave to the DCU and get to Epoch and end this cosmic crisis.
weathering wildstorm 