Changes in The Weather: Stormwatch #18 Review

Editor’s Note: They try to spoil the world, but they make no effort to change it.

Do yourself a favor and don’t let yourself too pissed off about the fact that we’re staring down the barrel of yet another reboot within the pages of Stormwatch. Sure, it means that the continuity we’ve spent about 54 bucks on since September, 2011 is now an anomalous waste of money with no bearing in the DC Universe, and it means that we get to sit through our third or fourth origins of Apollo and The Midnighter since thinking impure thoughts about Britney Spears was icky for a whole different reason, and we’re now forced to buy into yet another mandate for the existence of a superhero team – first it was a United Nations team, and then they were self-built to save the world, and then they were the descendants of Demon Knights – on an infinite timeline we will reach the point where Stormwatch comes together in an elevator to bring justice to the real bastard: whoever farted.

So you will be tempted to spin yourself up into a screaming frenzy of rage over the fact that, only a year and a half after the New 52 reboot, Stormwatch #19 represents the team’s second full reboot – and it is a full reboot – in less than two years ago. And you might feel the urge to scream because you now need to get used to an almost completely different set of characters, from familiar ones like The Engineer to weird ones like, well, The Weird, who is probably only recognizable to serious 1980s Justice League International fans who read an obscure 1988 miniseries featuring the character – a miniseries that I don’t believe has ever been reprinted, and for which I now need to dig through God knows how many longboxes to find. And you could find yourself frothing over the changes to more familiar, classic Stormwatch characters that writer Jim Starlin has chosen to make – Jenny Soul? Really? Warren Ellis created Jenny Sparks as the Spirit of The Twentieth Century due to the rise of electricity, so the Spirit of the Twenty-First Century is Jenny Soul? What, did Bob Harras shoot down “Jenny Xenu”?

You might feel this rage – and clearly I am feeling some of it as well. But you shouldn’t feel it, for a few specific reasons that I will get to in a second. But mostly you shouldn’t feel it because the story doesn’t warrant it. Not because it’s an awesome story, because it certainly isn’t. It’s okay, inoffensive and talky on a good day, and it builds the team based on stakes that, compared to what brought Warren Ellis’s, or even Paul Cornell’s Stormwatch, barely seem to exist at all.

But you shouldn’t let it piss you off. For reasons that we shall discuss.

So, the original, post-New 52 Stormwatch is gone. Kaput. Some fire-faced aliens in costumes apparently bought on consignment from The Jackson’s 1984 Victory tour spend a single panel implementing “Time Line Magenta” (which will be the name of the Drag Queen Ska band I will manage into world domination), and poof! Stormwatch goes bye-bye. Erased from history with a word and in a single page. Just… gone. I am not kidding. Anyway, say hello to the new Skywatch “satellite,” an undetectable spaceship flown by Storm King – a dude in a unitard you can see stars through – and Storm Control – a different dude in a different unitard who is hiding his identity from the rest of the team, which they are busily in the process of building. These guys have recruited old favorites like Apollo, The Midnighter and The Engineer, some old favorites with arbitrary changes made (Like Hellstrike, who is now South African rather than Irish, and a racist for… I don’t know, flavor? And we’ve got Fuji, who is now called “Force” for some reason, and we’ve already talked about Jenny Soul, who takes the mouthy leader from Warren Ellis’s Stormwatch and turns her into a cringing agoraphobe), and new member The Weird. Storm Control gets them together on a mission to protect the Earth… and then immediately tells them they need to go off into space to face a familiar enemy, just so we remember that we’re still in the DC Universe.

The biggest problem that this book faces it exposition. It is loaded with dudes talking to each other, discussing who everyone is and why they’re doing the things that they’re doing. Most of the first six pages of this book is comprised of various characters talking about they stuff that they intend to do and why; all told, I counted at least 14 or 15 pages of people just talking, with just enough action of The Engineer battling some nameless bad guy to haul in some African junkie who is destined to become The Shaman to keep the book from becoming My Dinner With Storm Control.

The tricky part is that, given what Starlin is trying to do with Stormwatch, I’m not sure that he had much of an alternative to making this particular issue a talkfest. The man has decided, for good or ill (or intervention from DC Editorial), to arbitrarily wipe out Stormwatch continuity and start over from literal scratch, and that means he needs to spend a certain amount of real estate to establish the new team, the reasons behind them and the rules, and given 20 pages, the only way you’re gonna do that is words. Now, Starlin could have saved himself some of the heavy lifting by simply glancing over the character who haven’t changed much and who we are, therefore, already familiar with… but the problem is that he puts the action on The Engineer’s back instead. So we spend all the action with a character who we already know, and whose capabilities we already know, and in the meantime only get a panel or two with Jenny Soul, The Weird, and Force – hell, Force doesn’t even get to say anything in this issue. Jesus, we get three word balloons about who The Weird is, which left me with only the vaguest knowledge of what he can do, and I’ve read the 1988 miniseries that introduced him.

So what we’re left with here is a talky book that reboots everything we thought we knew about this team, with characters that we don’t know and capabilities we are unfamiliar with. We, in fact, only see the team assembled once, and that’s around a table, talking about when they will actually, you know, do something. And regular Stormwatch readers might find themselves pissed off to have to sit through another talky origin for the umpteenth iteration of this team. God knows I am tempted… but the reality of the situation is that Stormwatch pretty much exists to be torn apart and utterly reinterpreted. Warren Ellis did it by raising the political content of the team and eventually turning them into The Authority. Mark Millar did it by making The Authority into a real world power. Grant Morrison did it by putting the team into our universe where there are no superheroes. And Paul Cornell did it after the New 52, and that’s not to mention aborted efforts like Stormwatch: Team Achilles. Stormwatch is historically a blank slate that is apparently tossed to creators with the mandate of, “Do whatever you want, just make it sell.” So now we have The Weird and Jenny Soul. Next time it might be Ambush Bug and Wild Dog. What matters is the execution… and there is far less execution than exposition here.

Yvel Guichet’s art is pretty solid, straight-ahead comic art. The images are in a fine but simple line, with generally realistic figures and expressive faces that are just on the cartoony side. He executes the variety of weird and interesting things in this book, from people to robots to magenta drag queen aliens, very well, and his backgrounds all appear to be hand drawn and very detailed, which helps sell the story. Guichet’s panel layout and pacing are a bit off, but it’s hard to really blame him for this – this book is packed with words, and to fit them all in means you need a lot of panels, but that also means that we wind up with pages of conversation with a bunch of small panels that speed the reader through them. But what we wind up with is simple, easy to access comic art; I probably wouldn’t elbow people out of my way to buy this in artists’ alley, but it works well enough given the needs of a packed origin script.

Stormwatch #19 is a flawed comic. It is talky, it makes arbitrary changes to characters that we’ve known for years, and it just doesn’t have time to explain those changes, let alone the sudden and catastrophic events that led to this complete reboot. But I am willing to forgive a certain amount of this, because it is an origin issue, and because Stormwatch exists to be rebooted at will as a showcase for the creator. And despite the sins of this book, the fact of the matter is that I like Jim Starlin; his run on Batman in the late 80s and early 90s, which included Death in The Family, helped make me a fan of that character for life. So I am prepared to hang in and see what Starlin has in mind… up to a point. Because let’s not forget that, during that same run on Batman, Starlin created the K. G. Beast.

Not every new character is a winner, that’s all I’m saying.