I read and enjoyed Wildguard: Casting Call as a miniseries, but the trade paperback gave me the chance to revisit the story and see how it all held together. I wasn't too surprised to learn that in collected form, the series not only stands up but actually is just a little bit better than I remember it being. Nauck started off with an unusual high concept, superheroes as reality TV, but what makes Wildguard cool is that it's just a really solid take on the superhero genre, with a stunning array of brand new characters. Casting Call is an enjoyable action romp with just the right touch of melodramatic subplots and stylistic "reality show" tweaks. It also features a superhero cast larger than any you'll find outside the Legion of Superheroes, and Nauck has a wealth of interesting characters and ideas here beyond just the high concept or his central cast.
Casting Call sort of hits all the superhero genre tropes as it goes along. The first issue reminds me of nothing so much as a Legion of Super-Heroes tryout issues, with all the wackiness and "who will survive?" drama that entails, but with a slightly different spin given its place at the center of a media event. Over the course of the remaining issues, we get more than one giant superhero slugfest, the lone hero against an overwhelming force, a couple different takes on the traitor within subplot, a secret origin of sorts and several moments where the heroes find their powers and courage tested. In the pages of Wildguard: Casting Call, Nauck distills the essence of years of successful superhero team comics into a shiny new take on that aspect of the genre.
Half of the important work with this kind of concept is coming up with interesting and fun characters, and Nauck certainly doesn't skimp there. Some of the characters get full-blown multi-page development, some only a few panels, but all of them are fun characters that don't just fit into the usual archetypes but instead encompass the full range of strange and sometimes silly abilities that super-heroes could possess. I loved characters like Kid Citrus, sidekick to what sounds like a nutrition for kids comic-book hero Vitamin Justice or Adhesor, the poor guy who is essentially a living Post-It Note with hilariously bad control over his powers, as much as I did the more serious characters like sensory specialist Red Rover, pyrokinetic Ignacia or stretchy guy Snapback. Many of them fit into standard archetypes, but for every couple of jungle-men or energy blasters, you've got unusual characters like a floating brain, a robot with an inferiority complex or a heroine who is self-aware of variant costumes and action figures. By the end of the book, the team is narrowed down to six characters, but Nauck has well over a dozen interesting characters who he can just afford to basically let slide. There are certainly room for spinoffs, side projects or just backup stories looking at all of these rejected heroes.
While Nauck puts a lot of work into the framework of Wildguard, its producers and paraphenalia and such, it's clear that he's thinking about the larger context. The notion of superhero as celebrity is explored in several different aspects in this series, from the character of Four to the self-absorbed Ultra Mega Super Five. The notion of a super-hero celebrity, who went from child star to teen sensation to popular young adult hero, is an interesting commentary not only on the nature of media stardom in our world but an interesting take on super-heroes that is rarely seen in the status quo of mainstream super-hero universes where heroes don't age. And I love the idea of farm team super-heroes, hoping to graduate to Ultra Mega Super Five or another big league team, as well as the idea that the big teams know of their popularity and use it for their own purposes.
Throughout my reviews of the miniseries, I expressed some disappointment with the artwork, but in rereading the trade, I've re-evaluated my appreciation for the work. Nauck has a ton of characters to work with here, and yet the action scenes flow smoothly and the crowd scenes are vibrant and exciting rather than confusing. His designs, from the heroes to the villains to the vehicles, are imaginative and striking. And much of the tone of the book, which is a delicate balance between humor and action, is captured in the artwork, as Nauck hits both slapstick and superhero melodrama moments very well.
The trade collection of Wildguard is a solid package, containing some interesting extras. Nauck's history of Wildguard text piece in the beginning is a fascinating insight into the work before it came into being, and it was great to see his sketches as a complementary look at the early days of the team. In terms of "warts and all," Nauck also reprints his first minicomics version of Wildguard which are, to be honest, pretty awful, with Extreme Studios style artwork and storytelling that embraces cliche rather than staying just the right side of it the way the final Wildguard series did. Fortunately, the deleted scene and Super Hero Happy Hour excerpt are from the more modern style, and both are excellent little tidbits for Wildguard fans hungry for more. After re-reading this trade and reading the Firepower one-shot, I would definitely put myself in that category of fan. 9/10
