Obscure Heroes: Wildstar
I like the weird and the wild of superhero characters. Sometimes certain figures never quite get the due I think they deserve. Obscure Heroes is all about celebrating those characters and maybe even what could have been with them.
WildStar created and owned by Al Gordon and Jerry Ordway.
Wildstar: Sky Zero was one of the initial “second wave” of Image Comics. Created by Al Gordon and Jerry Ordway, it stood next to Dale Keown’s Pitt, Sam Keith’s The Maxx, Larry Stroman’s Tribe, Keith Giffen’s Trencher, Mike Grell’s Shaman’s Tears. Like most of those stories, Wildstar lasted for only a four issue run. Unlike the others, that was all that was planned.
Al Gordon’s previous writing credits included fill-ins on Legion of Super-Heroes and Timber Wolf, so a story about time-traveling metahumans seems right up his alley. He comes in alongside legendary Superman artist Jerry Ordway to produce a new book about an aging hero from the future known as Wildstar. It seems he is stuck in a time-loop, but for most of the series, we are not sure why. But once again he travels in to the past in an attempt to stop the post-apocalyptic badlands of his current existence.
In the past, he comes across a government agency responsible for alien tech as well as Mickey, the son of the agency’s head. But Wildstar didn’t time-jump alone and he has a half-dozen other metas to make his way past. Wildstar and Mickey become inexplicably linked as he tries to escape attack from the other time travelers and their duped government allies.
By the end of issue three, our hero is dead, but as in so many comics, it is a death that won’t last.
Wildstar would later return for a ongoing series that would last only three issues and a guest shot in Rob Liefeld’s best Image title, New Men, before returning again fairly recently in the pages of Savage Dragon under the new name of Soulstar. It seems a copyright dispute left the character without a name… and those old issues unsaleable. It’s a damn shame too. Whatever his name, he was a damn fine comic character. He also remains one of several comic characters I would love to see return in some kind of print form.
