Wild Dog #1

History

The character grew directly out of the creative partnership Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty had already forged on their crime-comics series Ms. Tree; according to Beatty, a stated motivation for pitching Wild Dog to DC was to generate revenue that would help keep Ms. Tree financially afloat. Collins, a crime-fiction writer deeply versed in pulp-vigilante archetypes — Zorro, The Lone Ranger, Mike Hammer, Dick Tracy — deliberately designed the costume to be something any ordinary person could assemble: camouflage pants, a football jersey bearing a red-dog logo from a college team, body armor worn underneath, and a hockey goaltender mask. Editor Mike Gold oversaw the series and actually pushed to hold Wild Dog's secret identity reveal for a hypothetical second miniseries, but Collins insisted the whodunit be resolved within the original four issues. The issue was published with a cover date of September 1987, edited by Mike Gold, lettered by John Workman, and colored by Michele Wolfman, with inks by the legendary Dick Giordano adding polish to Beatty's pencils.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of Wild Dog (Jack Wheeler), created by writer Max Allan Collins and artist Terry Beatty, with inks by Dick Giordano — cover-dated September 1987, DC Comics.
• Opening chapter of a four-issue limited series; the story is titled 'We Interrupt This Program…' / 'Who Is Wild Dog?' and sets up the whodunit mystery of the hero's secret identity, which is not revealed until issue #4.
• Wild Dog's costume — camouflage pants, a college football jersey with a red-dog logo, and a hockey goaltender mask — was designed by Collins and Beatty to represent a 'real-world' DIY hero with no special resources or powers.
• The character is set in the Quad Cities region of Iowa/Illinois, making him one of the very few DC heroes anchored to a real Midwestern American city rather than a fictional or major-coastal locale.
• Wild Dog earns his name in-story when a SWAT captain orders his men to shoot the masked vigilante 'like a wild dog in the street,' and the label sticks in the press.
• After the miniseries, the character carried three story arcs in Action Comics Weekly (during that title's incarnation as a high-page-count anthology), followed by a standalone Wild Dog Special (1989).
• A reimagined version of the character — Rene Ramirez, played by Rick Gonzalez — appeared as a recurring and then main cast member in the Arrowverse TV series Arrow beginning in Season 5 (2016), retaining the hockey mask and red-dog imagery while changing the civilian name and ethnicity.
• Jack Wheeler later reappeared in DC continuity as a supporting character in Gerard Way and Jon Rivera's Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye (2016), part of DC's Young Animal imprint.

Full credits

Variants (2)