Long Beach Comic Expo ’14: Wetworks 20th Anniversary Panel

20 Years ago, nearly to the month, an amazing comic series saw birth at Wildstorm Comics. This comic series was Whilce Portacio’s Wetworks. Originally intended to premiere 2 years prior, as one of Image Comics’ company launching titles, personal family issues relating to the creator delayed the title. Yet when it erupted it was big. Up there with other great Wildstorm titles, like WildC.A.T.s and Gen13, Wetworks told the story of Colonel Jackson Dane and his team over covert operation soldiers that had been betrayed by their government while gaining super powers of sorts in the way of a golden symbiotic fluid that protected their bodies from extensive damage the might otherwise kill a normal human. Using this power and their extensive military training, Dane and the rest of his wetworks squadron soon found themselves fighting monsters like vampires and werewolves to protect the human race.

Wetworks has seen several incarnations over the years, both at Wildstorm in the 90’s and later at DC, after the company purchased Wildstorm, in the mid-2000’s. Behind it all, since its creation, has been creator Whilce Portacio. Today, Portacio celebrated the comics 20^th anniversary in a panel at Long Beach Comic Expo. Filling a small room on the second floor of the Long Beach Convention Center, Portacio spoke about the series he created and his time at Image before a captivated audience. The panel was moderated by Tony Guerrero, editor-in-chief of Comic Vine.

Portacio pointed out the origins of the comic in several fun and unique points during the panel. Responding to questions about the Night Tribes, the villains of the comic series, Whilce had stated that the idea spun out of how the creators could allow the characters to violently fight villains during an era of the comics code of authority. The answer? Whilce realized that he could blow up aliens and monster’s heads and it was more than okay because they simply weren’t humans. Then, by making the human heroes near invincible with huge guns and tons of ammo, Whilce was capable of drawing incredibly epic and high explosive action sequences in the pages of Wetworks that would make Michael Bay’s films look like child’s play while before the director even got that reputation. Portacio also spoke briefly of Colonel Dane, who was created as a strong leader who actually wanted to lead. Whilce explains his creation as being made because of the strong military family background he comes from. He was not a fan of leaders that didn’t want to lead the teams they took control of, like Wolverine who drowned himself in drinks over the weight put atop him. Undoubtedly the military background in Portacio’s life also heavily influences the military background of the Wetworks squadron. But it was the use of emerging technology around the creation of Wetworks that led to many of the innovations and ideas the helped drive the story and art of the series.

It may be hard for some to remember, but 20 years ago many modern art technologies and ways of transferring art digitally simply didn’t exist or were still in experimental stages. During the panel, Whilce spoke about how in the early days of Image the company really pushed into new areas simply because the founders were all young and just didn’t know any better. Their early use of Photoshop and tablets highly influences the ability to display and edit artwork early on in the series. Even the use of scanners helped, as Portacio could send art from the Philippines with the early usage of the internet. His time in the Philippines not only influenced his art but also allowed him to share the artwork of many talented Pilipino artists with the often considered American medium of comics.

It was also the youthful spirit of simply not knowing better and yet trying to be better that led to the 2 great waves of Wetworks action figures in 1995 and 1996 from McFarlane Toys. As Todd McFarlane started to revolution toys with his line, he approached Whilce to design the action figures of his own comic series. Whilce shared with the audience in attendance of the panel some of the early design sketches for the figures while explaining the intricacies of toy designing and how they took somewhat revolutionary approaches and attempted cool new ideas like the joints that allowed the werewolf figures to go from canine like stances to tall humanoid poses.

While the 2006 Wetworks series was not heavily spoken of during the panel, Portacio did bring up its original writer, Mike Carey. Portacio pointed out that he heavily admired Carey, and particularly loved how at one point the writer had told Portacio that he broke the genre with Wetworks back in the day. Whilce claimed he was very proud of hearing Mike say that and felt early on that truly fit the series as Wetworks’ theme was that of humans trying to better than humans.

When asked if Whilce ever intended to return to Wetworks, he said he would love to but there were currently no plans. But he did end the panel by giving everyone in attendance an exclusive 20^th Anniversary Wetworks print (shown below) and signing for many of the comic series eager fans.