Gatecrasher

Somewhere between the alien-invasion blockbuster and the teen sex comedy, Amanda Conner carved out her own pocket of the turn-of-the-millennium comics landscape. Gatecrasher was the debut title of Black Bull Media — the short-lived publisher launched by Wizard magazine founder Gareb Shamus and co-founded by Conner’s partner Jimmy Palmiotti — and it announced the arrival of one of comics’ most expressive cartoonists with a hormone-fueled bang. Co-created in 1999 and in stores from 2000 to 2001, the series is a dimension-hopping super-team romp that CBR’s Augie De Blieck Jr. fondly dubbed “the ‘Porky’s’ of the genre.”

The hook is pure late-’90s high concept: teenager Alec Wagner is an otherwise ordinary kid with a spectacular secret life. He’s part of a top-secret team tasked with keeping hostile aliens off planet Earth via jumpgate technology — a network of interdimensional portals that lets the Gatecrashers hit enemy fleets before they ever reach the atmosphere. Naturally, this absolutely wrecks his social life. His parents are gone, his girlfriend gets stood up at prom, and every attempt at a normal date is interrupted by an incursion. Written by Mark Waid and Jimmy Palmiotti with input from Shamus and Fred Pearce, the book blended soap opera with space opera, balancing alien war, teenage hijinks, and the occasional self-contained gem like “Blue Tonya,” a glorious Red Sonja parody.

But the star of the show is Conner’s art. As CBR’s retrospective column put it, she “shows how you can mix action/adventure with a certain level of cartooniness to pull off both comedy and drama — often at the same time,” her expressive faces and kinetic layouts carrying the book even when the scripts wobbled. Palmiotti’s inks, Paul Mounts’ glossy neon colors, and lettering from Comicraft and Chris Eliopoulos polished the package into a slick, lovable roller-coaster ride. The run lasted ten issues — the four-part Ring of Fire miniseries plus an ongoing series that jumped the cast from high school to college — before Black Bull quietly shut its doors. Its would-be TV adaptation, optioned by ReBoot studio Mainframe Entertainment, never made it to air.

Today, Gatecrasher endures as the origin point of Conner’s creator-owned voice — the book where the cartoonish warmth and comedic timing that later defined her legendary Harley Quinn and The Pro first took center stage. Long out of print, it’s a collector’s hunt rather than a shelf staple, but single issues still surface on Amazon and the League of Comic Geeks catalogues the full series. Perfect for fans of Painkiller Jane, Mark Waid’s kinetic superheroics, and anyone who loves Amanda Conner’s art enough to chase down her indie roots.