This Book Is Now About Martians (And Other Aliens): Stormwatch #1 Review

What’s that old saying? “Roofie me once; shame on you. Roofie me twice and I will pistol grip mace bomb you.”? I think it’s safe to say that I approached the new Stormwatch with exceedingly mixed feelings.

I absolutely adored the book when Warren Ellis wrote it and I followed it over into The Authority, although based on this quote I found on The Authority’s Wikipedia page, that book almost didn’t happen:

one of the reasons I turned their STORMWATCH into THE AUTHORITY is that I found out that, despite the fact that no-one was buying STORMWATCH, they kept it going because they liked reading it in the [Wildstorm] office and wanted to keep me employed. And I felt so bloody awful about that, and at the same time had been so struck by Bryan Hitch’s STORMWATCH issues, that the train of thought that led to THE AUTHORITY began.

The Authority limped through many incarnations of writer and artist after the inital Ellis/Bryan Hitch run that included Mark Millar/Frank Quietly, Robbie Morrison/Dwayne Turner, Ed Brubaker/Dustin Nguyen, Grant Morrison/Keith Giffen/Gene Ha…actually it’s around here that I started to tune out of The Authority. I think I might have picked up “The Authority/Lobo” one shots (‘cuz, you know, it’s friggin’ Lobo), but I was pretty burned out on the book. And, it didn’t help that somewhere in this time period Wildstorm tried to relaunch Stormwatch with the blatantly anemic Stormwatch: Team Achilles and Stormwatch: Post Human Division. It’s dead, Jim. Stop being a necrophiliac.

But, back to the actual book.

There have been plenty of mixed reviews on line. Comic Book Resources gave the book 2 out of 5 stars, while IGN recommended the book. My own feeling is that this book is never going to be something that can be considered on its own merits as long as it stands in the shadow of Ellis’s work on the original, much as Rob pointed out earlier today regarding the Giffen/DeMaettis run of JLI. Look, sometimes you can’t go home again and it’s not just because of the restraining order. It’s the restraining order; your mom renting out your room to the Martian Manhunter; and, your house going back in time to before most of your buddies ever met.

Stormwatch finds us at a time in which Jenny Quantum is 14 years old and not adopted by Apollo and Midnighter. In fact, they aren’t even together yet. A team of Stormwatch members which include Jack Hawksmoor, Martian Manhunter (!) and new character The Projectionist are on Earth working to try and recruit Apollo. He’s not having it. Plus, things get even worse for the team when Midnighter shows up:

Aw. You had me at "I'm".

Meanwhile, out in space, there’s this going on:

Well. This can't be good.

So, pretty much everybody’s having a five fingers of whiskey with a whiskey chaser kind of day. And, I liked it. I’ll buy the next book. Writer Paul Cornell gets the initial voices of the characters right without feeling like he has to channel Ellis. Miguel Sepulveda draws a hell of a space beastie and his landscapes are phenomenal. Is it Warren Ellis? No. Is it possibly a thinly veiled attempt to shoehorn more Wildstorm characters into the DCnU? Maybe. But overall, I just think it’s too early to judge.