EXCLUSIVE: First Promotional Image For Warren Ellis's The Wild Storm To Run In This Week's Comics

With just a few weeks remaining before the first issue of Warren Ellis's anticipated The Wild Storm, which will reinvent DC's Wildstorm universe for the post-Rebirth era, the company will release its first official promotional image for the event in this week's comics.

Seen below, the ad tells audiences very little about what's going on in the series, but offers what may be an official logo of some kind for the story arc itself.

You can see the full image in the image gallery attached, along with the solicited covers for the first two issues of The Wild Storm.

In keeping with its name, the image in The Wild Storm ad was based on a storm warning flag.

In U.S. maritime warning flag systems, a red square flag with a black square taking up the middle ninth of the flag, as seen in the image above, is used to indicate a storm warning. The use of two such flags denotes a hurricane force wind warning or a hurricane warning.

Inside the red section of the flag, of course, is the swirl of lightning that traditionally resided inside the "W" on the WildStorm logo in previous DC iterations (and the whole logo in some early versions from Jim Lee's days of running the studio by himself, if we recall).

The Wild Storm, with art by Jon Davis-Hunt, will serve as a launching pad for several future series: Michael Cray, WildC.A.T.S. and Zealot. No creative team announcements have yet been made for those books, except that Ellis will oversee the pop-up imprint as a kind of "showrunner," a la the role Gerard Way has taken on with DC's Young Animal.

"There are precious few visionaries in our business and fewer still like Warren who can elevate mythos with both stylistic panache and idiosyncratic spectacle. His work at WildStorm remains the tone which best defines and reflects the WildStorm Universe," said DC Publisher Jim Lee. "I know I speak for WildStorm fans the world over when I say I can't wait to see what Warren and Jon have in store for fans in February!"

The original WildStorm imprint started up at Image Comics under Lee, who was one of that company's seven founders. Launched in 1992, the imprint churned out a series of best-sellers during the boom of the '90s. After dipping his toes back into the Marvel waters with Heroes Reborn, Lee decided that he would rather be an artist tan a publisher and sold WildStorm and its properties to DC Comics in 1999. Lee has worked exclusively for DC since, and currently (ironically) serves as one of their two publishers.

Other WildStorm titles not included in this announcement include Wetworks, Gen 13, and StormWatch. StormWatch is one of the few WildStorm titles (along with Grifter and Voodoo) to have been given a chance in 2011's The New 52 relaunch. A Midnighter series was recently published at DC, to great critical acclaim but low sales. Its cancellation was quickly followed by the announcement that Midnighter writer Steve Orlando will write a Midnighter and Apollo miniseries for the publisher.