DC Comics Resurrects Wildstorm As Pop-Up Imprint Curated By Warren Ellis [NYCC 2016]

In the late '90s and early '00s, Warren Ellis helped reinvent Wildstorm Comics for the 21st century with runs on titles such as Stormwatch, The Authority and Planetary. The imprint and its characters were folded into the regular DC Universe as part of The New 52, but next year DC is setting them up in their own corner of the publishing line once again, with Ellis taking control as the curator of a new "pop-up" imprint similar to Gerard Way's Young Animal.

Wildstorm was founded by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi as an imprint of Image Comics in 1992 and gave birth to franchises such as Gen13 and WildCATS. In 1998, the imprint was acquired by DC Comics and mostly operated as a separate entity with offices on opposite coasts of the country, until the imprint was shuttered in December 2010.

The new Wildstorm will launch in February 2017 with a new series titled The Wild Storm by Ellis and Clean Room's Jon Davis-Hunt, which will reintroduce classic Wildstorm characters in their own universe away from the prime DC Universe.

The Wild Storm will later be followed by three other ongoing series, Michael Cray, WildCATS, and Zealot, though no creative teams have been announced for those titles at this time. Hunt has provided several new characters designs, including new looks for the iconic Grifter and The Engineer.

Whether the new imprint will see the return of Jenny Sparks, the Wildstorm character most associated with Ellis, remains to be seen. Given that she was explicitly the Spirit of the 20th Century, and died on January 1st 2000, it would take some creative thinking to bring the character back.

DC is set to reveal more information about the new Wildstorm imprint this weekend at Saturday's "Meet The Publisher's" panel at New York Comic Con, which takes place 4pm-5pm EST. Check out the rest of Hunt's character designs below.