Comics: Stormwatch, issues #1-6

In 1993, Wildstorm comics launched Stormwatch, a typical 90's blood n' guts/faux military comic book with gritted tooth heroes protagonists. The series was forgettable until Warren Ellis—The Most Awesome Deflier—took over, gutted it, and spent 25 issues bashing America and stroking pet characters until the series was canceled and the non-pet characters killed off in a WildC.A.T.s/Aliens crossover/cashgrab.

It sounds terrible—barely footnoteworthy[1], but it was seminal and those pet characters[2] became plank owners for The Authority.

Also written by Ellis, The Authority was the prototype of big-screen, no-holds-barred, decompressed storytelling. The adolescent, oversexed, ultra-violent comics of the 90's finally evolved into mature, slightly-sexed, ultra-violent comics of the 00's. The Authority's success—and it was successful—was largely due to being well written (first by Ellis, then by Mark Millar) and being something completely different.

The Authority declined as Ellis and Millar moved on, and other writers, including Morrisons of the highly-acclaimed Grant Morrison variety and the less-acclaimed Robbie Morrison breed, helmed the series with little success.

In 2010, Wildstorm was shuttered with the promise that their characters would return in the DC Universe proper. It seemed unlikely that many of the radical characters of Wildstorm would keep their identities in the relatively buttoned-down DCU. Doubts were much higher for the cast of The Authority, for reasons best explained with a gif:

That's The Authority's Midnighter destroying an American tank (and neck) in Afghanistan. Those aren't rogue soldiers hunting down puppies[3] or some unnamed American ally acting as a stand-in. That's Midnighter killing American troops...because.

I can't imagine it tests well with focus groups.

Even if you dial the rest of the team back to a "10" and swap Midnighter for Barney the Purple Dinosaur, you're still dealing with the people who spent their time between stopping extinction level events toppling whatever baseline governments were getting on their nerves that month.  They are not the kind of superpowered beings who can share a planet with Superman without someone getting punched into some permanent behavior modification.

And now, after several hundred words, our conversation turns to the current Stormwatch series in which Paul Cornell takes over, guts it, and packs in a handful of new pet characters.  I'll be the first to admit that "pet characters" isn't a fair name. "Ablative" is a bit more accurate, as the C-plots regularly intertwine and blast them free of the cast page at a rate of one for every other issue.

To Paul Cornell's credit, this is always done to introduce or tease some bedrock part of Stormwatch's corner of the universe that has to be seen to be really believed. Sure, they mention the undead panel of ghost-men who handle the logistical/management end of Stormwatch, but it's not until they drag Travis Tritt screaming into nothingness for being a Toreador that you get the impression it's not just some metaphor.

Of course, having their field leader untethered from the land of the living is a distraction, as they still have to deal with A-plots which consist of making two Silver Age plot devices have a flipper baby, then making that flipper baby into a fully functional "Assault Moon!" "Alchemy Squid!" or "Gravity Miner!"[4].

None of those things are complaints; there are call-outs, foreshadows, crazy mcguffins literally lying around, and more character development than most previous incarnations of the team. I love classic Authority/Stormwatch like crazy, but most of the time they were defined by how they bitched/whined at their teammates and how cool they could look killing things. O'course, that characterization was in place because those stories went big and had some consequences attached. There just wasn't time for characterization!

Cornell is trying to cram massive, genie-power-sized space adventures into a strict, genie-lamp-sized corner of a universe. The Projectionist has to make sure no one notices a massive space monster wrecking a farm by framing The Fox for attacking Earth with The Moon. They mention other heroes showing up after them and being confused by their wake, but as near as I can tell, no one really notices. I'm glad Cornell's focusing on characterization because he doesn't have room to do anything with a greater scope without it falling flat for the reader because no one in Metropolis is going to look up and notice.

The last thing I want to go over is The Midnighter and Apollo relationship. When I first learned they were going to be in this series and not start out as a couple, I was dismayed (not as dismayed as I was by The Midnighter's chin spike, but I digress). I was afraid that in an effort to give some emotional context to their relationship, they'd cut out a lot of the straightforward badassedness of the characters, and thereby make them some combination of too emotional/ignorantly gay/straight up offensive/stupid, plot-sucking waste of time. I'm usually the first guy to protest when the only two gay characters[5] are paired off because of course they're hot for each other. My biggest beef with this is the Ultimate Beast/Ultimate Colossus pairing because as an X-Men comic the characters had the emotional capacity to have a more complicated interplay. The Apollo/Midnighter pairing is like Lois and Clark; it is—no. It is Lois and Clark, but gay. I had always imagined their relationship starting in accordance with the following flow chart:

I can't say I disapprove of how Cornell has handled things so far:

Alright. I fully approve.

...once they finish up with all those @#&*ing aliens.
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[1] Also, the art was pretty terrible and the only thing that made the inconsistent costumes tolerable were all the lampshades.

[2] and the person whose power was flying? for some reason?

[3] They were selling tanks to local militias, which seems like an absurd piece of information, but Midnighter says it's an obviously stupid idea, so I'm glad that we didn't even start using tanks in Afghanistan until two years after this story was written.

[4] Technically, the Gravity Miners come after the first six issues, but you take my point.

[5] Or really any "only two [insert minority here] characters."