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.

Gravity Doesn’t Suck: Stormwatch #7 Review

In reading Stormwatch #7, it occured to me that the best Stormwatch and Authority stories (and let’s face it: the New 52 Stormwatch is just The Authority with The Martian Manhunter) have been simple sci-fi and superhero comic tropes, only racked up on amphetamines and extrapolated out to their craziest violent extreme. Warren Ellis had them fight God. Mark Millar did great tales of the team fighting “The Avengers” (Sure, it was a pastiche of a famous superteam, but with personal and sexual problems… but up to a point, isn’t that all The Authority was?).

In this, writer Paul Jenkins, in his first issue on Stormwatch (First of two before Peter Milligan takes over), starts with an idea you could pull out of any Doc Savage story or early issue of Justice League of America – The Gravity Thieves! – and spins it out into a very dense-feeling, hard sci-fi(ish) story that, if not in league as the classic Ellis and Millar stories, at least it’s in the same ballpark, swinging for the fences.

The book hits pretty much every mark on the successful Authority story checklist. Weird sciency shit blowing people up in gruesome ways? Check; got that out of the way by the end of page two. Unknown, faceless entity demonstrating its power by taking out Big Gun Apollo? Yup; disembodied energy tentacles, to excite even the most darkly perverse hentai/tazer “enthusiast”. Find out that the threat is potentially extinction-level in nature to Earth? Hell, this one is capable of stealing gravity with their energy tentacles and wiping out all life in the known universe… possibly from being hit at high speed by hentai/tazer enthusiasts being flung through zero gravity in the opposite direction of their penises.

Turn Off The Dark: Milligan Leaves Justice League Dark

We’re in an age of 90s nostalgia in comics, what with more spider-clones, someone thinking Todd McFarlane is worth suing, and Rob Liefeld finding steady work that doesn’t involve a riding mower or medically required applications of Zovirax. And for those of us who had their 80s comics habit survive through that somewhat empty decade only because of Vertigo comics, this is a development that in many ways feels like flashing back to being a Boston altar boy in 1972.

But for those of us who did survive 90s comics and their excesses thanks to Vertigo, a bright spot of DC’s New 52 has been Justice League Dark, which, while not perfect, gave us Peter Milligan writing both John Constantine and Milligan’s old favorite of mine: Shade The Changing Man. And God knows that the book was in no way perfect, including the end of the first arc where the team finally got together… and said, “Fuck all y’all, mates” and immediately disbanded.

Well, I’ve got some bad news: Peter Milligan is leaving Justice League Dark. But I also have some good news: Jeff Lemire, writer of Animal Man and Sweet Tooth, is taking it over as of issue 9. And Milligan is shifting over to Stormwatch to take over from Paul Cornell.

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.