Resident Evil · WildStorm Productions · From 1998 · 5 issues
Capcom handed Resident Evil to Jim Lee's WildStorm, got a Jim Lee cover, ninety collectible character cards, and an anthology explicitly declared non-canonical.
Resident Evil: The Official Comic Magazine ran for five issues from March 1998 to February 1999, published by WildStorm Productions. It was one of several licensing moves by Capcom and Capcom USA to push Resident Evil at demographics the games were not reaching, and it was built as an anthology rather than a continuous narrative — each issue collected several short stories, mixing adaptations of events from the first two games with side-stories and entirely original tales. The first issue carried cover art by Jim Lee and contained four full-length stories, and WildStorm produced ninety separate "character cards" as promotional collectibles for the series. The arrangement with Capcom was unusually loose, and it shows in the material. The stories were explicitly not part of the games' prime continuity. Capcom supplied a degree of oversight and some concept art, but the writers were otherwise free to fill in gaps in a fiction that was, at the time, only partially known outside Japan — much of Resident Evil's supporting lore had not yet been translated or established for Western audiences. The result is a strange, uneven, occasionally lurid artefact: an officially licensed comic that the licence-holder had pre-emptively declared apocryphal. WildStorm returned to the property in 2001 with Resident Evil: Fire and Ice, a single continuous story carrying over several characters from the anthology.
An officially licensed comic that its own licence-holder declared apocryphal
The contradiction in the title is the most interesting thing about the book. It is "The Official Comic Magazine", produced with Capcom's cooperation and concept art, and it is simultaneously outside the continuity of the games it depicts. That is an arrangement almost nobody would accept today, when franchise continuity is managed as a corporate asset and every tie-in is either canonical or does not get made.
In 1998 the calculus was different. Resident Evil's lore was thin, largely untranslated, and not yet understood as valuable in itself — the games were selling on atmosphere and shock, not on a cosmology. Capcom could therefore afford to hand the property to WildStorm's writers, let them invent freely, and simply disclaim the results. The freedom produced work of wildly variable quality, but it also produced work that a tightly-managed canon would never have permitted.
The ninety character cards are the detail that dates the project most precisely. In 1998, the assumption that a comic needed a collectible-card programme attached to it was not eccentric; it was standard practice, inherited from the trading-card boom that had recently made and then nearly destroyed several publishers. Producing ninety cards for a five-issue anthology is a piece of promotional arithmetic in which the merchandise substantially outnumbers the material it promotes.
Read now, the whole package — variant-adjacent cover prestige, a card programme, an anthology structure, and a licence held at arm's length — is a near-complete inventory of how the American comics industry handled a video game property at the end of the 1990s. It is more useful as a document of comics publishing than of Resident Evil.