Stormwatch #3 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Miguel Sepulveda (artist), Alex Sinclair & Pete Pantazis (colorists)

The Story: Cloudy, with a chance of meteors that may devastate the planet.  Bundle up!

The Review: Whenever you have a band of super-powered individuals banding together to fight evil, comparisons to the Justice League are inevitable.  Since the League is universally regarded as the primo superhero team in the DCU, and often includes the most recognizable icons, every other team has to not only distinguish its mission statement, but its members as well.  It’s a challenge, all right: how do you beat characters like Superman or Batman?

Stormwatch doesn’t make it easier on itself with such obvious analogues to the World’s Finest in Apollo and Midnighter.  This issue has Apollo flying into space, where direct exposure to the solar radiation that fuels him puts him into overdrive mode.  Good thing, since he does the heavy lifting, destroying a massive asteroid singlehandedly.  Meanwhile, Midnighter has to get over his loner methods to work with a whole gaggle of extraordinarily empowered people, and he feels out of place fighting space creatures when the only thing he can really bring to the table is his tactical mind (“I know how to kill anything.”).  Sound familiar?

That said, we also get plenty of evidence Stormwatch is nothing like the League, especially where power sets are concerned.  Here, you finally get a better understanding of how some of the team’s more bizarre gifts work, like Jack Hawksmoor’s.  As it turns out, when he says he talks to cities, it means he literally sits down among them—elegant Paris, modern It-girl Metropolis, and demonic, rambling Gotham—and has a pleasant chat (“Paris sends her love.”).