Number of the Beast is a new miniseries from WildStorm.  Told you it was a quiet week.

The WildStorm Universe titles have been floundering for quite a while now, lurching from relaunch to relaunch without ever seeming to achieve a great deal.  The imprint presents a real problem for DC.  How do you market it?  In its early days, WildStorm was the vehicle for the hot stories of the early 1990s; but that style is long gone.  Then, for a while, it was a smaller publisher where writers could take a slightly different approach to the superhero genre, resulting in hits like Authority and critically acclaimed cult books like Sleeper.

But for the last few years, WildStorm's been looking a bit downtrodden.  The last major relaunch was a fiasco, with most of the new titles vanishing almost immediately.  Subsequent crossovers have sunk without trace.  The theory that the WildStorm characters have a built-in audience waiting for a relaunch has been convincingly disproven.  So where now?

Well, DC's usual answer is to re-tool the patched and beleaguered property one more time, in another Crisis-Lite.  The solicitations for Number of the Beast make it sound like such a series, as does the cover which proclaims its connection to Armageddon and Revelations, two earlier WildStorm events that didn't exactly set the world alight.

But Number of the Beast doesn't feel like that sort of comic at all.  On a first read through, I was largely baffled as to what it was trying to do.  Second time round, it seemed to make more sense... as issue #1 of a Paladins miniseries.  The familiar characters of the WildStorm Universe are more or less absent.

The issue opens with a couple of henchmen in an hidden lair dealing with the remains of the High, a Superman analogue who appeared in a Warren Ellis StormWatch story a decade ago.  That scene ends with a couple of footnotes referring to other recent WildStorm books you haven't read, and generally seems to set the book in the direction you'd expect.

After that, however, we switch to an issue about the Paladins, WildStorm's newly retrofitted quasi-Silver Age superteam, cheerfully defending their generic city against thoroughly arbitrary and equally retro attackers.  And that basically continues for the rest of the issue, as the nice heroes bounce around town, villains are taken out, and bad guys just keep showing up in order to provide more fighting.

What makes this a tough sell, in storytelling terms, is that the big idea seems to be that the Paladins are appearing in a story that doesn't make a great deal of sense - it's literally just a string of random fights - but that they and their opponents seem largely oblivious to this.  One member tentatively raises his concerns that something's a bit off, but that's literally it.  And in order to make this story concept work, writer Scott Beatty ends up devoting a fair chunk of the issue to events which, on a first reading, are largely nonsensical.  On subsequent readings, they're also largely nonsensical, but at least the nonsense seems to have a point.

I'm not generally a big fan of Silver Age retro teams, which are all too frequently bolted onto nascent superhero universes in imitation of Marvel and DC.  However these are guys are quite fun, and beautifully designed.  Some are echoes of existing characters.  Others are intentionally dated, such as Johnny Ray-Gun, whose power is that he has a ray gun.  But they feel like the sort of characters who wouldn't be out of place in Kurt Busiek's Astro City.  Chris Sprouse's art brings out their Silver Age tendencies without going for Silver Age homage, and gives the issue the charm it needs to work.

That said, I'm not altogether convinced that this device works - it's still a very choppy issue, in which the second half is endearing but ultimately baffling.  As such, it doesn't really get the plot under way, at least not in any readily comprehensible fashion.  But against my better judgment, I'm coming round to this issue.  Meta-superheroes have been done many times before, but these guys seem like they could be fun to read about. 

Rating: B+

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