Whenever a new creative team takes over an ongoing title, it’s always interesting to see the approach they’ll take to put their stamp on the title. It’s usually apparent that a new writer has taken over the characters quite early on, especially if you’ve read been reading comics long enough. It’s even more apparent when the writer literally titles his first issue “Reset.”
Written by Jim Starlin
Illustrated by Yvel Guichet and Jonas Trindade• Team StormWatch is lost in a dimension shift—so what team will rise and take their place?
When “Stormwatch” launched at the beginning of the New 52 the premise of a Paul Cornell-written series about a team that secretly oversees Earth as it becomes populated with metahumans, superheroes, and villains for the first time sounded promising. The series lost Cornell early on, replacing him with Peter Milligan and the plot never quite found its way toward fulfilling that initial mission statement. At their core, the Wildstorm characters are supposed to be modernized (sometimes satirized) facsimiles of characters like Superman and Batman. In the end, putting these characters in a world with Superman and Batman proved problematic. While Batman and Superman were fighting Darkseid, Apollo and Midnighter were in-fighting with everyone (when they weren’t in-fighting with one another), the Eminence of Blades was backstabbing the team, and nobody knew what the hell Martian Manhunter was doing there.
Basically, “Stormwatch” never found its footing in the DC Universe, because for a larger-than-life concept, they were all acting pretty silly, wearing bad costumes, and not accomplishing much of anything. All of the above is likely the reason why Jim Starlin thought it better to wipe all of those 18 issues out in less than 3 pages. With something as intangible and high-concept as “Stormwatch”, a complete reboot is not necessarily a storytelling crime in an of itself. Starlin does write it as a totally instantaneous deus ex machina sort of thing, but there are laughs to be had when he winks at the concept of a “reboot” by having a character deadpan that this sort of thing has happened a dozen times before.
It’s just a shame that the most enjoyable thing about “Stormwatch” #19 is the way that it unflinchingly takes a bulldozer to everything that came before it. The rest of the issue is one of the most by-the-numbers “team recruitment” issues you’ll ever read. This issue commits the crime of putting together the new Stormwatch team almost entirely through a series of “superhero baseball cards.” Well, basically. Starlin does spend a lot of time with The Engineer on her first recruitment mission with the new Stormwatch, but there is no context given for her task or why Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum are there to try and foil her retrieval efforts. Gee, those Batman villains are everywhere, aren’t they? (see: “Swamp Thing” #19) Starlin oscillates between “exposition city” and context-less chase sequence. There’s just not a feeling that “Stormwatch” has any clear direction, but that was sort of the idea behind rebooting it entirely in the first place, right?
If the script doesn’t give enough context for what “Stormwatch” is doing, the art sure doesn’t help it either. The characters and scenery lack the detail necessary for the traditional superhero comic style that the artists are going for, which just makes for art that doesn’t always look as good as it could. The faces of humanoid characters emit less personality and expression than those of the artificial or alien beings of “Stormwatch.” But the bigger issue is that the placement of the characters in the environments and their physical relationships to one another are often oddly skewed, making it sometimes needlessly laborious to follow the action. A chase scene in the middle of the issue takes up a lot of page time, but there is little payoff. There are some odd perspective choices made and a lot of the action on-panel takes place in transitions between actions, rather than during actions. That is, things that exist in the “gutters” between panels that our minds normally fill in themselves are depicted, while other, more interesting moments in time are left to our imagination. It’s tough to notice something like this because it’s a very subliminal concept, but it’s definitely a problem when you do.
It was actually fun for a few pages to see a storied creator like Jim Starlin come in and perform his own little “Flashpoint” on a struggling book, but what he goes on to replace it with is no more assured or momentous than what had come before. In fact, based on issue #19 alone, there is nothing to distinguish this team from the one that came before aside from a few character swaps. The mission statement purports to be the same. Perhaps the fresh characters will be enough to inject life into this series down the road, but right now the table setting feels awfully dry. Without art dynamic enough to hook the reader in and plot that unfolds in the driest way possible, “Stormwatch” hasn’t yet found its niche in the DC Universe.
Final Verdict: 2.8 – Pass, until the next “Stormwatch” reboot.
