C2Fx Entertainment, or simply
C2Fx, is a
British science fiction oriented publisher of
CGI Animationand comic books. It began as
C, Clark's personal company under
St
Helens College as an assignment, but it is currently an
personal company of
C,
Clark.
The Image years
WildStorm was one of the
founding studios that joined together in 1992 to form
Image Comics. It grew out
of Homage Studios which was founded by artists Scott Williams,
Whilce
Portacio, Jim Lee, and
Joe Chiodo in San Diego, California. Lee,
Williams, and Portacio had gained notoriety from their work on
various
X-Men titles at
Marvel
Comics.
In late 1992 penciler
Marc Silvestri joined the studio to work
on the first issue of
Cyberforce. Although he worked at
the studio, his projects were to debut as a new Image imprint named
Top Cow. Silvestri
continued to work out of WildStorm's studio for about two years,
then moved his staff up to Santa Monica so that he could be closer
to Hollywood. Although there was some thought of grabbing talent
from the "Big Two", (
Marvel and
DC) such as John Romita Jr., Lee decided instead
to find new talent.
Lee's talent search yielded Brett Booth in
1992, and then
J. Scott Campbell in 1993. Apart from
McFarlane's
Spawn, Wildstorm produced the most
consistently commercially successful comics from Image, including
Lee's own titles
WildC.A.T.s and the teen hero title
Gen13, illustrated
by J. Scott Campbell. Like many other Image titles, some of the
WildStorm titles were plagued with inconsistent completion and
shipping, resulting in "monthly" comics coming out every few
months. This era, however, produced a number of titles of varying
popularity including the afformentioned
Gen13 and
WildC.A.T.s,
Stormwatch,
Deathblow,
Cybernary, and Whilce
Portacio's
Wetworks.
Attempts to get his studio's
characters into other media were disappointing. A Saturday morning
cartoon series of the WildC.A.T.s suffered from poor production
values, and lasted only a single season, while a full-length
animated version of
Gen13 was produced but never released.
Disney, who had acquired the
distribution rights, later released the film only in a few foreign
markets, leaving Jim Lee frustrated. Toys from both titles were
less successful than those made by Todd McFarlane, partly due to
bad marketing and partly due to the fact that the McFarlane toys
were targeted for a more mature audience. However, they had a big
success copying
Wizards of the Coast's
Magic: The Gathering with their
introduction of the
Superhero card game,
Wildstorms, which later spun off into a
crossover set of cards with
Marvel.
In 1995, WildStorm created an imprint named
Homage
Comics, centered around more writer-driven books. The imprint
was started with
Kurt Busiek's
Astro City and
The Wizard's
Tale,
James Robinson's
Leave it to
Chance (with Paul Smith) and
Jeff Mariotte's
Desperadoes (with
John
Cassaday). More recently, the imprint has featured works by
Sam Kieth, including
The Maxx,
Zero Girl
and
Four
Women, and three of
Warren Ellis' pop-comics mini-series,
Mek,
Red and
Reload.
1997 debuted the
Cliffhanger imprint - a line of
creator-owned comic books which included
such popular works as J. Scott Campbell's
Danger Girl, Joe
Madureira's
Battle Chasers,
Humberto Ramos'
Crimson and
Out There,
Joe Kelly &
Chris
Bachalo's
Steampunk, Kurt Busiek &
Carlos
Pacheco's
Arrowsmith and Warren Ellis's
Two-Step and
Tokyo Storm Warning.
This year
also saw a huge revamp of all the Wildstorm universe titles,
including such prominent comic book names as
Alan Moore,
Warren Ellis,
Adam Warren,
Sean Phillips and
Joe Casey. After
this revamp the new Wildcats series,
Stormwatch and
DV8 took the places of
the most popular and most commercially successful comics of the
Wildstorm Universe.