Let's make no bones about this: The Wild Wild West was the ultimate genre show and I suppose that's probably what limited it to four seasons (on the other hand, TV worked differently back then). The plots of most episodes were devious science fiction capers - as a child I remember marveling at one in which a cadre of world leaders were going to be replaced by evil automatons - about world domination, massive financial fraud and resource grabs, all perpetrated by a legion of villains, sometimes of the critter-of-the-week Scooby Doo variety but some few of them recurring masterminds of crime who saw themselves as the archnemeses of the show's two star characters: the generically romantic paladin Jim West and the roguish conman Artemus Gordon. If you like Leverage or even The Rockford Files, you have The Wild Wild West to thank, in no small part, for making it OK for heroes to lie and maybe even to cheat a little.

On the other hand, the show had a tendency to be a bit of a mess sometimes. Artie might connive his way into the villain's stronghold but nobody could get back out without Jim punching everything out of their path. The scripts were littered with grieving, compromised or otherwise hobbled female characters for Jim to clutch and nearly kiss before a guard stormed the door. It was a little like taking Captain Kirk at his most wench-grabbingest and pairing him up with an older, male Faye Valentine at the peak of her relatively good-natured greed and dishonesty. Mix in some genuinely clever plotting about very contemporary concerns - manipulation of money policy, the rise of a politically-savvy eugenicist or the power of a maniac to use hallucinogens to control people - in a vaguely steampunk world long before that term existed and you've got something magical... and something messy. The ambience and overall feel of an episode could go all over the map in the course of just one short hour. Most of the time it managed to come together somehow by the end of the episode but not always. I never cared, though. I loved it anyway. My boyfriend and I both watched it as children and reminisced about it as adults. When we happened to find it playing on a random cable channel a few months ago we TiVo'ed the hell out of it. The DVDs are a strong "maybe" for holiday gifts every single year.

OK, fine, but what about this comic? It is absolutely true to the TV show: it is a huge, absurd mess of a plot about a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government, it features the greatest of the show's villains, Dr. Loveless, and it can never quite decide whether it's an action movie, a heist story, a conspiracy thriller or a shoot-'em-up. It's a train wreck in a lot of ways but it is absolutely one of the most enjoyable comics I've read in years. The writing is 100% true to the characterization of the TV show including their bad points. On the show, Jim West is happy to make out with the women he saves but he doesn't offer up much in the way of equality - sometimes being more than happy to enforce the dominant paradigm - even though the show itself is quick to remind viewers that the female characters can have just as much agency as anybody else; well, more than they're allowed in the vast majority of westerns, anyway. The 1991 writers don't shy away from that, either, showing West and Artie being quite frankly utter dicks to Susan B. Anthony at one point. The characterization is so precise in its recreation of a historical view of a historical setting, particularly in that scene, that they got letters from readers lambasting them for featuring Artie and Jim as backwards chauvinists and letters accusing them of trying to shoehorn progressive politics into the book. Their refusal to overlook the backwards attitudes of the 19th century nor to miss a chance to try to right the balance a little was a nice, subtle way to cast my enjoyment of the original show in a new light without diminishing it.

The art, I have to be honest, varies. Sometimes it's really great and sometimes it is scary bad. The profiles of West and Gordon in the back of one of the issues are completely terrifying: West looks like William Shatner more than anything and Gordon has the Pedo-Bear stare if I've ever seen it. Their faces are inconsistent and the level of basic artistic competence is pretty inconsistent; sometimes perspective is so twisted in service to getting something important into the frame that the art takes on a nearly hieroglyphic quality of abstraction. There are some real moments of artistic triumph, however, times when I looked at the page and I felt, deep down, that this was every bit a further iteration of the show itself that I'd hoped it would be: an addition to the story, not an imitation of it.

Are there pangs of regret and threads of tragedy also attached to my memories of the show and brought out again by this comic? Absolutely, yes. The actor who played Artie died too young in 1981 and the actor who played Jim West spoke at the 2004 Republican Convention which, well, need I say more? Still, there's a lot of love in my heart for this show, for the stories and the performances, and for the way it took staid and familiar genre materials and knitted something completely unique out of them.

The story of Millenium Publications seems to be a sad one, but their catalog looks fascinating. I wish more of their titles would wash up on nearby shores as this one did. They adapted an Anne Rice novel, a few Lovecraft works and converted several other properties to comic form. In that respect they strike me as having been the Image or BOOM! studios of their day in some ways, but in the case of Millenium they were simply ten or maybe twenty years too early. They're gone now, and have been for more years than they were around in the first place, but their work is still appreciated and I'm very glad that I got to enjoy this single sample of it. As for the writers, I couldn't find much information on one of them but one member of the team, Mark Ellis, has written dozens of novels and comic books in a variety of genres. Personally, I plan to pick up a book or two just to show my support for his work on this.