Wildstorm was Jim Lee’s imprint in Image Comics, debuting in 1992’s WildC.A.T.s #1. While Spawn was probably the crown jewel of Image, Wildstorm was very successful, giving opportunities to superstar artists like J. Scott Campbell and producing series such as the aforementioned WildC.A.T.s, Gen13, and StormWatch. It also contained sub-imprints like Homage (the original home of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City), Cliffhanger (Danger Girl, Battle Chasers), and ABC (Alan Moore’s imprint).

While the universe began with an obvious inspiration from X-Men, Jim Lee’s previous team book, it had an interesting evolution. Over time, the stories put heavy emphasis on themes of government conspiracies and geopolitics. The Authority was probably the best example of this, featuring stories of the team directly interfering in both fictional global affairs (going to war against the despotic Asian country of Gamorra) and real-life events like the 1999 Russian invasion of Chechnya. There were also strong metatextual elements in books like The Authority, StormWatch, and especially Planetary, all of which featured thinly-veiled analogues/parodies of Marvel and DC characters.

Despite Jim Lee selling the imprint to DC Comics in 1998, Wildstorm was kept as a separate continuity, which at the time, was a very good thing. Reading comics in 1999, it really felt like the Wildstorm universe represented the next frontier in superhero fiction. Just as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns pushed the genre in a new direction, it felt like Wildstorm was going to inform the next several decades of comics. In a roundabout way, it did – Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s Ultimates was very much “The Authority meets the Avengers”, and that series in turn has had a large influence on the MCU. However, due to a number of factors (editorial interference, bad management, and changes in the cultural zeitgeist), Wildstorm dramatically lost popularity throughout the 2000s.

When DC relaunched with the New 52 in 2011, the decision was made to merge Wildstorm with the main Earth Prime continuity. DC has a long history of throwing their acquired properties into the mainstream universe (Fawcett, Quality, and Archie superheroes/Red Circle all found their way to Earth 1/Earth Prime), but it was still a surprising move given that they had owned the characters for over a decade at that point. In my opinion, this was terrible idea. The unique qualities of the universe and characters were stripped out to fit into the DC universe, and company themselves had, a decade earlier, published a story about how the Authority did not belong in Earth Prime (the famous and celebrated Superman story “Whatever Happened to Truth, Justice, and the American Way?”). They never found a way to make the idea of the Midnighter and Apollo existing in the same universe as Batman and Superman make sense.

So my question is, did anything good come from combining Wildstorm with the mainstream DC universe? I expect that, with the announcement that James Gunn has commissioned an Authority movie, that interest in the universe/characters will increase. Should DC focus more on better integrating Wildstorm in DC, or spin them back off into their own universe?