Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

From the title here, a casual reader might think they know what to expect. With Batman’s tangles with Predators having become a regular fixture of the franchise and many publishing companies searching for similar revenue streams, the stage seems set for a knockabout one-off crossover, pitting the then-fading Wildcats team up against Ridley Scott’s finest. Obviously, such a cash cow would be kept at arm’s distance from the core Wildstorm books…

What you don’t expect, however, is for most of the cast of one of Wildstorm’s core books to die off-panel. In structure, the story is a textbook disaster/horror movie, with the Wildcats team reforming to answer a distress call from the Skywatch Satellite, only to discover that the situation is far worse than they feared, and they’ll need to band together with the survivors to escape the nightmare. Writer Warren Ellis obviously had very different ideas to most of his contemporaries as to the point of such a crossover, seeing his guest stars as being a sufficiently big gun for him to blow away much of the baggage which was still cluttering his work on the ongoing Stormwatch series. Although by this point he had been writing Stormwatch for a considerable period of time, Ellis’s dissatisfaction with the book as he inherited it still shines through, and he takes considerable pleasure in bumping off many of the weaker characters he had previously been forced to play with. Staying true to his licence, there’s distinct horror tone to much of the story, with the Wildcats having to flight against Aliens spawned inside members of the Stormwatch team.

Only one member of the team is allowed to retain his dignity, with Winter sacrificing himself at the conclusion of the story to save the Earth from infestation. To add insult to injury, the story concluded in the next issue of Stormwatch with the (Ellis-created) survivors of the team going off to form The Authority, a group with very similar aims to an outfit that was ranged against Stormwatch only a few issues earlier. There isn’t a great deal of plot here, but the writer’s knowledge of the Skywatch setup is put to good use as the Wildcats conduct a surprisingly logical analysis of their situation. Chris Sprouse makes a reasonable fist of the art duties, although his style lacks the detail need to convey the book’s sometimes gruesome content.

It’s not high art, but there’s a certain satisfaction in watching such a comprehensive assassination.