The days must be confusing and empty for an unemployed former editor-in-chief. No storylines to revise, no meetings to attend, just a vastly greater amount of time to watch daytime television and wonder how the kids are going to be put through college.

However, now Bob Harras has finally made it back into gainful employment with WildStorm, and has promptly paired himself up with Chris Claremont. That's nice for him. It must be just like old times.

For WildStorm, this is one of a series of rather odd choices. Creatively the imprint seems to be floundering around incoherently, with no very clear idea of what it's trying to achieve. There was a time when you knew what you were getting with a WildStorm book - it would feature art by Jim Lee, or more likely, one of his pallid clones. There would also be a writer, since somebody had to fetch the coffee. It was a simple formula, but hell, it seemed to work.

More recently, WildStorm wandered off in a different direction. The most distinctive books it has put out in the last few years haven't been distinctively Jim Lee at all. It's turned into a more diverse and decidedly improved range of books, with the titles Lee created being overshadowed by AUTHORITY and PLANETARY.

The imprint's superhero titles were something a little off-beam compared to the mainstream DC Universe - it's hard to imagine mainstream DC touching a book like THE MONARCHY. And a few months ago, it was clear where WildStorm was going - a string of mature readers relaunches that were seemingly going to position WildStorm as a mature readers superhero line, making it official who the target audience was. Distinctive, at least, and it might well have worked.

But WildStorm's most recent actions are hard to make sense of. They seem to have taken fright of the very things they had been getting right, and are taking refuge in a form of "playing it safe" which most likely isn't going to work.

WildStorm had a clear sense of direction, but recently it's taken fright. The treatment of AUTHORITY and GEN13 are the two most obvious signs of WildStorm's floundering. AUTHORITY has done rather nicely as a flagship for the line. The Ellis and Hitch issues are the comics equivalent of a good Hollywood blockbuster. Mark Millar sensibly took the title in a different direction, giving the title an anti-establishment skew and playing up the cast's desire to use their power to change the world.

It's around this point that things started to go seriously awry, with artist Frank Quitely leaving mid-storyline. Conventional wisdom says to hire a quick replacement artist. WildStorm said bollocks to conventional wisdom, and hired the glacially slow Art Adams, requiring a completely new storyline to fit in the extended gap before the next issue would be ready.

Since September 11, DC has had panic attacks about the "widescreen" gimmick itself. Millar claims that in fact there isn't very much of that in the remainder of his storyline, but he seems to be having difficulties anyway. AUTHORITY: WIDESCREEN has been pulled from the schedules altogether, apparently on the grounds that scenes of a devastated New York are too distressing to be seen, ever. Brian Azzarello has pulled out of the relaunch, though in fairness, that seems to be his decision as much as DC's. Rumours are circulating that Millar's storyline will limp to a conclusion, and then the book will be quietly put to death.

This seems a bizarre turnaround from the plans to relaunch the title into the mature readers line. The change of heart is particularly difficult to comprehend when you look at mainstream DC books such as the mediocre JLA/HAVEN, which opened with a giant alien spacecraft crashing into an American town, killing 12,000 people by page three. Quite why this is okay, yet AUTHORITY: WIDESCREEN is unsuitable for human consumption, is difficult to decipher. There are different editors involved, of course, but it still seems unfathomably arbitrary.

DC's handling of THE AUTHORITY may be due to incompetence rather than malice. Conspiracy theorists have pointed to this as evidence that factions in DC have been gunning for AUTHORITY for a while now, and have finally seized on September 11 as an excuse to get rid of it once and for all. I can certainly see how people might find the book incredibly annoying. I often do - the sledgehammer politics are tiresomely simplistic, and Millar's stories often give me the uncomfortable impression that his primary aim is to show me how admirably radical Mark Millar is.

But the bits of the book that are trying to be controversial aren't all that outrageous. Gay versions of Superman and Batman are basically just a joke at the expense of the sort of people who get worked up at them. The Authority's "let's change the world" stance is in many respects tamer than Mark Gruenwald's SQUADRON SUPREME. Admittedly, Millar places his characters more firmly in the heroic role (which, depending on how you view it, displays either subtle irony on his part or a clodhopping lack of political sophistication). But at best, AUTHORITY is petulantly adolescent rather than truly threatening. And Millar was leaving anyway - what's so bad about the concept itself?

Maybe there are people in DC who are that easily threatened, but I tend to believe that things like this happen due to incompetence, not malice. A string of scheduling disasters and the sudden apparent insensitivity of the widescreen genre has led WildStorm to screw up its plans for their lead title in a blind panic. As for JLA/HAVEN, DC's left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing.

That fits with the treatment of GEN13, as DC has masterfully announced both the collection of Adam Warren's run in three trade paperbacks, and the cancellation of the series with a view to relaunching it under Chris Claremont. To say that this sends mixed signals about how DC view Warren's run would be an understatement. It's a shame, since Warren's GEN13 has actually been pretty good.

But maybe WildStorm has a point here. Warren's run seems to have fallen between two stools. The natural constituency for the book is readers who are actively hostile to the very idea of reading GEN13, still seen as a dimwitted T&A title for people who'll buy thirteen variant covers. Nowadays the T&A is firmly tongue-in-cheek and the IQ level has risen considerably. But it's still GEN13, a brand name that's been poisoned as far as the natural audience is concerned. Perhaps it makes sense to have Warren work on a title that the right audience might conceivably buy.

Assuming, of course, that Warren does have another project lined up with DC.

Claremont has a fiercely loyal fanbase, but there's damned little interest in GEN13. WildStorm's choice of a new direction for GEN13 is a weird one. Writer Chris Claremont's recent work at Marvel has received reviews ranging from mixed to negative. He'll be working under Bob Harras, an editor whose main claim to fame is having been in charge during the boring and staid period of Marvel history, against which the Quesada/Jemas regime forms such a stark contrast. Hardly names that make you think, "Well, they've got a strong creative direction there."

Of course, both men have upsides. Harras was an editor at Marvel during a very troubled time, presumably under tremendous pressure. He kept the wheels turning. He has experience. Claremont wrote good stories in the past. He still has a fiercely loyal fanbase (believe me), though how many of them he can bring to GEN13 is another matter. His sales tend to reflect the interest in the property he's working on, and there's damned little interest in GEN13. Put him on X-Men and you get X-Men level sales (his X-TREME X-MEN title is the lowest ordered of the four monthly titles, but it has the highest price point). Put him on a book nobody cared about to start with, and the spectre of SOVEREIGN SEVEN starts to loom. It might work, but it doesn't sound like a natural creative fit, or a commercial winner.

Six months ago, it was clear where WildStorm was heading - a mature readers superhero line. That was a natural outgrowth from the audience they'd built with AUTHORITY, PLANETARY, Joe Casey's WILDCATS and, yes, even the overly cryptic MONARCHY. The creator roster seemed decent, the plans seemed viable, and the idea sounded like it was worth a shot. The slow painful death of AUTHORITY, and putting GEN13 in the hands of a nostalgia act, are moves that do not fit with that publishing plan. DC as a whole has been looking very lumpen this last year in contrast to the reinvigorated Marvel. WildStorm had seemed like an exception to that; now, it's starting to look decidedly sickly.

Probably the dumbest thing DC could do with WildStorm is neuter it and turn it into just another superhero universe. WildStorm has something distinctive, but DC seems worryingly close to throwing it away.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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