A river doesn't run through it.
After reading a bunch of the trade paperbacks collecting Wildstorm's (an imprint of DC Comics) The Authority series, I've jumped back to read the available TPs collecting The Authority's predecessors, Stormwatch, a multinational, superpowered (don't-call-'em-superheroes) team run by the United Nations that will, on occasion, bite the hand of (our world's) UN's biggest financial backer, the U.S.
It's pretty telling that Wildstorm/DC haven't seen fit to publish reprints of Stormwatch's first 36 issues (in the first series, or Volume 1) in trade paperback format; the TPs only cover Warren Ellis' run on Vol. 1, #37-50, and his run on the 11-issue long Vol. 2.
Despite the fact that I picked up Stormwatch Vol. 1 in media res, I didn't feel particularly lost; the need for background, the references to series continuity, were minimized as much as possible. Then again, for me Stormwatch Vol. 1 was pretty humdrum and not terribly interesting, despite the occasional chuckle (such as Fuji revealing to some of his teammates, at Clark's Bar [the logo for which looks suspiciously familiar], that, thanks to his gaseous form being more sensitive to vibrations than a normal human body, he orgasms roughly every five minutes due to the vibrations created by ordinary people simply walking and/or talking in his vicinity); I'm just not interested enough to pick up the previous issues, even though it looks like the individual issues can be had rather inexpensively.
Oddly enough, Stormwatch didn't start to pick up until #48, the first part of the "Change or Die" arc (collected in Stormwatch: Change or Die), which dealt with yet another permutation of Superman (this time called The High) and some 1.0 versions of a couple of members of The Authority (The Engineer and The Doctor), as well as alternate versions of Batman (Blind) and Wonder Woman (Rite). Honestly, the only thing that stood out for me about this by now humdrum story of superheroes actually trying to change the world was the final fate of The High.
Stormwatch Vol. 2 perked up a bit with the introduction of the Superman / Batman analogues who would become mainstays on The Authority, Apollo and Midnighter (they're also gay lovers, in a neat fillip to decades worth of slash fic about Batman / Robin couplings), in the "A Finer World" arc, with gorgeous art by Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary, and colors by Laura DePuy; the storyline immediately following it, "The Bleed" (also collected in Stormwatch: A Finer World), with Hitch and Neary assisted by Michael Ryan, Lucian Rizzo and Scott Williams, is also fairly interesting, given that it introduces the conduit between alternate realities -- which was incorporated into DC's mainline continuity in 2006, in either the pages of Ion or the Sinestro Corps Special -- called, duhhhh, The Bleed.
But the thing that I found most interesting, thus far, about Ellis' run on Stormwatch came in Vol. 2, #3 (I think: it was difficult for me to determine, as Stormwatch: Change or Die isn't paginated and the ending and beginning of each issue collected therein aren't clearly demarcated): Dr. Robert Girard gives a briefing to the current director of Stormwatch, the Weatherman Jackson King (formerly field operative Battalion), with a rather alarming bit of conspiracy theory wackness (hopefully wackiness...):
Damn. And here I thought that all I had to worry about during the Cold War was the possibility of global thermonuclear war, with perhaps some chemical and biological warfare incidents tossed in for variety's sake. Who would've thought that either superpower would've also included slow motion suicide as part of their strategic planning; Brave New World much? (Although, to be fair, what Huxley called "ecological warfare" included what is more conventionally called biological warfare, since it encompassed "anthrax bombing". Still, this is just so much pettifoggery: call it a plague or call it God's divine wrath, it'll still kill you stone cold dead.)
It's pretty telling that Wildstorm/DC haven't seen fit to publish reprints of Stormwatch's first 36 issues (in the first series, or Volume 1) in trade paperback format; the TPs only cover Warren Ellis' run on Vol. 1, #37-50, and his run on the 11-issue long Vol. 2.
Despite the fact that I picked up Stormwatch Vol. 1 in media res, I didn't feel particularly lost; the need for background, the references to series continuity, were minimized as much as possible. Then again, for me Stormwatch Vol. 1 was pretty humdrum and not terribly interesting, despite the occasional chuckle (such as Fuji revealing to some of his teammates, at Clark's Bar [the logo for which looks suspiciously familiar], that, thanks to his gaseous form being more sensitive to vibrations than a normal human body, he orgasms roughly every five minutes due to the vibrations created by ordinary people simply walking and/or talking in his vicinity); I'm just not interested enough to pick up the previous issues, even though it looks like the individual issues can be had rather inexpensively.
Oddly enough, Stormwatch didn't start to pick up until #48, the first part of the "Change or Die" arc (collected in Stormwatch: Change or Die), which dealt with yet another permutation of Superman (this time called The High) and some 1.0 versions of a couple of members of The Authority (The Engineer and The Doctor), as well as alternate versions of Batman (Blind) and Wonder Woman (Rite). Honestly, the only thing that stood out for me about this by now humdrum story of superheroes actually trying to change the world was the final fate of The High.
Stormwatch Vol. 2 perked up a bit with the introduction of the Superman / Batman analogues who would become mainstays on The Authority, Apollo and Midnighter (they're also gay lovers, in a neat fillip to decades worth of slash fic about Batman / Robin couplings), in the "A Finer World" arc, with gorgeous art by Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary, and colors by Laura DePuy; the storyline immediately following it, "The Bleed" (also collected in Stormwatch: A Finer World), with Hitch and Neary assisted by Michael Ryan, Lucian Rizzo and Scott Williams, is also fairly interesting, given that it introduces the conduit between alternate realities -- which was incorporated into DC's mainline continuity in 2006, in either the pages of Ion or the Sinestro Corps Special -- called, duhhhh, The Bleed.
But the thing that I found most interesting, thus far, about Ellis' run on Stormwatch came in Vol. 2, #3 (I think: it was difficult for me to determine, as Stormwatch: Change or Die isn't paginated and the ending and beginning of each issue collected therein aren't clearly demarcated): Dr. Robert Girard gives a briefing to the current director of Stormwatch, the Weatherman Jackson King (formerly field operative Battalion), with a rather alarming bit of conspiracy theory wackness (hopefully wackiness...):
Damn. And here I thought that all I had to worry about during the Cold War was the possibility of global thermonuclear war, with perhaps some chemical and biological warfare incidents tossed in for variety's sake. Who would've thought that either superpower would've also included slow motion suicide as part of their strategic planning; Brave New World much? (Although, to be fair, what Huxley called "ecological warfare" included what is more conventionally called biological warfare, since it encompassed "anthrax bombing". Still, this is just so much pettifoggery: call it a plague or call it God's divine wrath, it'll still kill you stone cold dead.)