Stormwatch #1 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Miguel Sepulveda (artist), Allen Passalaqua (colorist)

The Story: Call me superstitious, but that moon gives me the creeps.

The Review: In one of my reviews for S.H.I.E.L.D., I spoke about the appeal of secret societies, the shadowy group of specially selected individuals who watch over us from afar and chuckle at our ignorance.  It seems DC wants its new universe to have an ancient, secret league of heroes right from the get-go, and so we have Stormwatch, one of many Wildstorm properties the publisher assumed a while back and only just now has found a use for.

Stormwatch certainly has the right makeup to handle the job of being DC’s premier team of unknown worldly guardians.  Here’s a sample: the Engineer, a lady-android with a sarcastic streak; Jack Hawksmoor, controller of cities; Projectionist, mistress media manipulator; and Jenny Quantum, the spirit of the twenty-first century—whatever that means.  That’s before we get to Apollo and Midnighter (Superman and Batman analogues), and good ol’ Martian Manhunter, who rocks a much more aggressive manner than the Zen psychic we’re used to.

But an interesting mix of characters and powers does not a great comic make.  For that, you’ll need a writer who can craft plots capable of actually challenging such a formidable set of beings, and what better man to do so than Cornell?  Anyone who read his run on Action Comics (prior to Reign of the Doomsdays, it goes without saying) knows this man can definitely whip up some serious sci-fi action in epic, mind-bending fashion.

And right from the first page, he puts our team in over their heads.  Somehow, they get spread so thin that Harry Tanner, master swordsman (“I can slice cold fusion from the air, cut my signature on a retina.”), winds up having to fend against the entire living surface of the moon by himself.  If that’s the kind of thing I can expect from this title on a monthly basis, consider me onboard.

Then you discover that whatever massive scourge is about to descend upon the planet, it’s not actually the foe we have to worry about.  This creature itself has fled from an even more knee-shaking entity, and its sole mission now is to prepare other worlds for the inevitable doom to follow.  Don’t hold out hope that it intends to do so with a gentle hand, though.  You don’t write in a giant, intelligent, matter-animating eyeball just to let it hide in the moon.