Team 7 #1

History

By late 1994, Jim Lee's Wildstorm Productions imprint had been running for roughly two years under Image Comics, building an interconnected universe of titles that shared characters possessing the Gen-Factor — a genetic abnormality that triggers superhuman abilities — but had never explained in one place how those men originally got their powers. Lee and co-writer Brandon Choi tapped Chuck Dixon, then one of comics' premier war-story craftsmen, to write the four-issue miniseries that would serve as that connective-tissue origin; Dixon was paired with penciller Aron Wiesenfeld and inker Trevor Scott. The series took a sharp tonal departure from Wildstorm's usual super-hero fare — Dixon built it as an espionage-and-horror war narrative with psychic powers treated as psychological weapons rather than flashy abilities — and the approach worked well enough that a follow-up series, Team 7: Objective Hell, was greenlit the same year.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of Team 7 as a unit: the issue gathers for the first time — in their pre-hero military identities — Cole Cash (Deadeye/future Grifter), Marc Slayton (Backlash), Michael Cray (Deathblow), Jackson Dane (Arclight/future Wetworks leader), John Lynch (Topkick/future Gen13 handler), Alex Fairchild (Slaphammer), Stephen Callahan (Wraparound), Phillip Chang (Bulleteer), Richard McNamara (Boloround), and Miles Craven as the principal villain.
• First appearance of Alex Fairchild (Slaphammer), Andrew Johnson, Berckmann, and Richard McNamara (Boloround) in any comic — all debut in this issue.
• First appearance of the Gen-Factor as a named, plot-driving concept in the WildStorm Universe; the issue establishes that Craven deliberately exposed the team to it during a Middle East mission and blamed Iran, an act of betrayal that underpins every subsequent WildStorm title involving these characters.
• Written by Chuck Dixon with pencils by Aron Wiesenfeld and inks by Trevor Scott; colored by Monica Bennett (WildStorm FX); lettered by Bill Oakley; edited by Bill Kaplan with Sarah Becker as assistant editor.
• The story is titled 'Gone Animal' and is set in the 1970s, framing the entire series as a retroactive origin — a prequel — for virtually the whole of the WildStorm shared universe.
• The issue shipped with two covers: a standard cover by Aron Wiesenfeld and Trevor Scott, and a variant (the 'Wildstorm Universe Puzzle Cover') illustrated by Whilce Portacio and Alex Garner — part of a 1994 Wildstorm-wide initiative in which eight titles' variant covers assembled into one large composite mural of the entire WildStorm character line.
• The four-issue miniseries was collected in a trade paperback (96 pages, softcover) in 1995, reprinting all four issues.
• Team 7's narrative legacy extended to two sequel miniseries (Team 7: Objective Hell, 1995; Team 7: Dead Reckoning, 1996), a New 52 ongoing series at DC Comics (2012–2013), and a reference in the live-action Arrowverse television series Arrow.

Cast · 18 characters

Full credits

Variants (1)