SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for The Wild Storm: Michael Cray #1 by Brian Hill, N. Steven Harris, Dexter Vines, Steve Buccellato and Simon Boland, out now.


Nearly two decades ago, Warren Ellis helped redefine the Wildstorm Universe when he took over Stormwatch and introduced characters like Jenny Sparks, Apollo and Midnighter. Alongside Bryan Hitch, Ellis took the superheroes of the Wildstorm Universe deeper down into the dark world of black-ops superheroics and brought them back out the other side and into the public eye with The Authority, while exploring the even weirder sides of the world with John Cassaday in Planetary.

RELATED: In The Wild Storm, Warren Ellis Takes Hold of a Universe

Now, Ellis is redefining the Wildstorm Universe in a whole new way for a whole new era. This time, instead of building on what came before, he gets to build it from the ground-up, reintroducing concepts such as The Engineer, WildC.A.T.S and Skywatch for a decade that is more obsessed with technology than ever before. As part of building that world out, Ellis has recruited other creative teams for stories set within his world such as this week's The Wild Storm: Michael Cray which sees the world's greatest assassin on the run from his old job, facing a possibly terminal illness and tasked with killing a mad billionaire recently returned from being lost at sea named Oliver Queen.

Meet The New Boss

Michael Cray

Prior to his own solo series, Michael Cray was working for International Operations, who sent him to kill Jacob Marlowe of the HALO Corporation but in doing so Cray discovered two things. One: Jacob Marlowe isn't quite human and two: neither is he. Cray has a lethal touch — a Deathblow, if you will — which is tied to a potentially cancerous tumor located in his brain. IO decided Cray was a better asset to them dead than alive and sent a team to kill him, but Cray took them all out and managed to get away, alongside Christine Trelane who offered him safety, his own team and medical support to diagnose and hopefully cure him.

Cray isn't too keen on working with a full team but he isn't fully against it either, as he settles into his new home in Oakland, not too far from his father whom he hasn't seen in seven years. Trelane tells him that his first target is a spoiled billionaire named Oliver Queen and tells him to go see his father to find out more information. Cray's father George isn't part of the global intelligence network but is a man with his ear to the ground in the community and he fills Michael in as to who Oliver Queen is, or at least what he knows.

Michael-Cray-Oliver-Queen

Oliver Queen survived a shipwreck which killed his parents and after a significant time stranded on an island he made his way home to America where he took control of his parents assets and is rebuilding their company in his own image. Curiously, George Cray points out how the situation isn't too different to another kid out there, one whose parents were shot in an alley and who inherited their billions as an adult -- an obvious allusion to the existence of if not a Wild Storm incarnation of Batman, then at least a Wild Storm incarnation of Bruce Wayne. As far as George Cray knows, Oliver Queen runs drugs into inner cities so that they become hotbeds of crime, then funds politicians who promise to bring the hammer down on those communities, allowing Queen to come in and gentrify the whole area.

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Someone Else, Something Else

Of course, we know Oliver Queen from the DC Universe as the Green Arrow, the left-wing Robin Hood of the Justice League; someone whose experience on the island of his shipwreck turned him into a better person, willing to take on crime, injustice and oppression wherever he sees it.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Oliver Queen in the world of The Wild Storm. When we see him in his private moments, he's scarily driven and cold to everyone around him. After sleeping with a woman, he offers her money for their dalliance, and when she tells him it's not necessary, he reinforced that everyone should know how much they are worth. In the world of The Wild Storm, John Diggle seems to work for him in some capacity ,and Thea is mentioned as someone who would change his sheets and sell them on eBay, so it's not clear if she is his sister, his maid or both.

While everything we've seen of Oliver Queen so far confirms that he is a jerk, Christine has some information for Michael that confirms Queen is worthy of his attention. Since coming back from the island, Queen constructed a man-made facsimile of the hell where he was stranded which he calls The Sanctuary. There, he dresses up in a green costume and hunts men — often veterans — for sport. When he was trapped on the island, Oliver Queen became upset with the idea that he was strong enough to escape it and survive it and now that he's out he compulsively needs to prove it to himself again and again. Trelane's organization doesn't care what he does in The Sanctuary, they just want his tech, but she knows Michael is someone that would care about that and so hopefully they can work together to a common goal.

Michael-Cray-Green-Arrow

The Wild Storm has toyed with DC Universe properties and concepts already, with cameos and easter eggs such as an alien dating show named Martian Manhunter and a pack of cigarettes called Doctor Mid-Nite. But the arrival of Green Arrow — and a tease of Batman — is a whole new level of crossover. It makes sense that if characters like Midnighter, Apollo and even Deathblow exist in the post-Flashpoint DC Universe then the same could be said of DC characters existing in the new Wild Storm universe. The big question now is who else is out there and how will that shape the future of this growing superhero universe in new ways that set it apart from the Wildstorm Universe of old.