My Special Yell Thing

When I get snarky about Stormwatch, you KNOW they’re doing something wrong.

Issue #5 was immensely disappointing, and here are the reasons why. (Oh, and “spoiler alert”, I suppose.)

I was willing to give Paul Cornell four issues to wrap up his apparent love for redundant exposition. That’s about the length of an average miniseries, which is already way too much exposition if every issue is full of it, but whatever. This exposition is now actively getting in the way of any kind of plot. At the end of issue #4, a character showed up to guest-star in a capacity where it actually killed a member of the Stormwatch team - their leader, no less. Now he wasn’t a very nice person, but he was the only POC on the team, considering that we have no idea whether Jenny Quantum is Singaporean like in the old universe, as her origin has now been changed along with everyone else’s (effectively robbing her of two loving fathers and a family of friends who care about her and encourage her in learning and developing her powers and becoming a strong, confident young lady OK OK I’m good now alrighty there). After this murder is casually accomplished, the interloper presumes to tell the entire team exactly where to get off, in addition to selecting their new leader himself, disregarding the team’s wishes.

Now, if you’re an average reader, like myself, you’re wondering, “Who is this nameless person? What is the Shadow Cabinet? Why do they get to tell the Stormwatch team what to do? Why can they walk in and kill Adam One, no problem?” Well, Paul Cornell has decided to give us a helpful two sentences at the beginning of the issue to help us out!

“Stormwatch, a secret organization that protects Earth from alien threats, is having a bit of a leadership crisis. Hence a visit from one of their mystery bosses, the Shadow Cabinet.” -Stormwatch issue #5

Lovely. Except that this tells us absolutely nothing about the Shadow Cabinet or why Stormwatch works for them. So, I took it upon myself to go the extra mile and do a little bit of research, something a lot of readers do not have the patience for, anyway. Wikipedia was kind enough to inform me, “the Shadow Cabinet is a secret organization of superhuman beings acting to protect the world by neutralizing potential threats while they are still relatively harmless - “to save humanity from itself, no matter what that requires”. The covert nature and dubious morality of many of these clandestine missions led to their being described as “the JLA as run by the CIA”.” So, in essence, you have one super-secret covert earth-protecting superhero team…that works for another super-secret covert earth-protecting superhero team? That is just stupidly convoluted.

By this point, I was praying to turn the page and see somebody punching somebody: a nice supervillain maybe, or some “alien” spaceships out for a joyride to blow up the earth. But, no. In addition to coming in and walking all over this team, comprised of people such as the Engineer, Jack Hawksmoor, the Martian Manhunter, and Jenny Quantum, all of whom have balls of steel (here disregarding Apollo and the Midnighter, who of course do not take crap from anyone, because at this point they don’t really care about these goings-on, which makes three of us), the mystery Shadow Cabinet person proceeds to take us through a dressing-down of each and every team member, which allows for - you guessed it - two more whole pages dedicated to exposition on each individual character (barring, again, Apollo and the Midnighter). Now, we’ve already seen Jack talking to cities individually, and even raising one out of the earth. We’ve seen the Engineer in action, Jenny Quantum teleporting things and “doing force fields”, the Projectionist, “Harry Tanner”, and J’onn, all in action. They all just fought a giant sentient blob from outer space. This is how readers traditionally learn about characters’ powers and personalities - by seeing them in action, by reading the story and seeing these characters being who they are, not by talking at us about who they are and what they’re like until we ragequit the comic. But no, we get more pages full of everyone standing around and talking. Because we just haven’t had enough of that so far.

Now, this was possibly my favorite part of the issue. (See: irony.) In the past few months, we’ve seen the Engineer, always an amazing heroine and legitimate badass, take charge of the team after their seemingly-incompetant leader Adam dropped the ball in that area. As a fan of the Authority who loves Angie to death, this was an amazing moment for me, and it was very touching that the Midnighter instantly had her back when she took command. Cornell has said in an interview that he purposely set up a situation where Angie was more suited to lead the team than Adam, and she’d been making noises about taking over for several issues. Everything was leading this way. It would have been excellent. Imagine my shocked disdain when Cornell had the mystery man suddenly appoint his pet character, the Projectionist, team leader. This character has been rather scoffed at by readers for her power of “media manipulation” by the fandom, which is incidentally a feat well under Angie’s jurisdiction and capabilities already, but Cornell seems to love her: he’s described her in that same interview as akin to “Kif from Futurama”, regarding her aggrieved attitude working for a frustrating boss. Obviously he has some affection for his original character, which is the only conceivable reason I can see for appointing her over Angie, who’s had several issues leading up to this; or Jack, who led the Authority quite capably for god knows how long, for being apparently too “unpredictable” to lead, whatever that means; or Jenny Quantum, who, aging with the century in this continuity, is now twelve, a mere two years younger than she was when she took over leadership of the Authority and whipped the team back into lethal form. Or J’onn! Why not J’onn? He’s a huge name in the DCU, on the Justice League for crying out loud - even if he didn’t want the position, this Shadow Cabinet emissary has made it very clear that appointment as leader is not optional. This guy runs down every character and gives a remarkably insufficient reason why they can’t lead the team, while to someone who knows these characters - and let’s face it, anyone who’s a fan of these guys probably knows about them from their Wildstorm days - any of them would be better qualified to lead a superteam than the Projectionist, of all people. The idea is completely absurd.

To give an example of the inane dialogue that comprises this part of the comic, here is the panel regarding this “Shadow Cabinet“‘s judgement of the Engineer:

Shadow Cabinet Guy: Okay, okay! Angela Spica, the Engineer, control and affinity with machines through nine pints of nanite blood—

Angie: Yeah, but no, I’m a good girl. Hey, wait — I never took that book back to Catford Public Library.

SCG: The Life of Pi? I know. You’re too individualistic to lead Stormwatch.

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT DIALOGUE???

SERIOUSLY? What did ANY OF THAT EVEN MEAN?

If anyone can make any sense of that, please do let me know. I have this weird feeling that it’s encoded or something.

Also in this conversation, we learn that Jenny is apparently the daughter of “a high-ranking military man. Who still thinks she was murdered by terrorists. And she doesn’t care.” That is more than a little unsettling. If this “high-ranking military man” isn’t a real monster, and we don’t have story to that effect, that’s a lot of backstory that we’re not getting and it feels really, really cheated. Not to mention, the “Harry Tanner is somehow evil….?” subplot came to a boiling point this issue. Now, we still have no idea why he’s evil, who he is or where he’s from, really - what was the point of introducing a “master swordsman” to the team who’s going to be mysteriously double-crossing people if he gets up to literally nothing and his evil is just really impotent and stupid? We never find out if he killed the moon because he didn’t want it talking to the rest of Stormwatch, or what specifically he didn’t want it sharing. We don’t find out why he’s evil, or why he’s infiltrated Stormwatch at all. All we see is him frantically running away and grabbing data files randomly. He says the Shadow Cabinet has turned the others against him and they’re hunting for him, seems to be in a genuine panic to escape. But…why? Why did he want this information? Did he really go to all this trouble just to get some files? Apparently so - he evades the Midnighter, abducts the Projectionist - yay - and flees, blowing up the team’s HQ as he goes.

Unfortunately, due to his convoluted wording, we have no idea whether he simply blew up the station, or “blew” the “alien horn” they found and which has been sitting dormant and unexplained since issue #1. First, Cornell recycles an old line of the Midnighter’s from his first appearance in Ellis’s Stormwatch, and he says, as he did in the old series, “I’m going to enjoy crippling you” to Tanner before the man flees. And as Tanner is called (apparently) “the Prince of Lies”, it seems really weird that he would hesitate in conversation with the Midnighter, cluing him in to the fact that Tanner was going to attack him. Isn’t lying effortlessly and well his thing? The Midnighter could have picked up on a heightened pulse rate or increase in body temperature, or hey, a novel idea - the computer in his brain could have predicted that Tanner would pull something like this, due to his agitated and paranoid(-seeming) state, so naturally the Midnighter would be prepared to defend himself! The computer-brain-tactician-angle is kinda his thing, after all. Yeesh…

So, Stormwatch #5: one big, giant clusterfuck of disappointment. And this is coming from someone who loves half of the characters to death. Unfortunately, they’re all sitting around talking about eachothers’ powers and trying to figure out a game plan constantly, so we haven’t gotten to see any of the great personalities I know they have. It’s really disappointing, and honestly, my biggest problem with the reboot isn’t the change of costume or teams or what-have-you as much as people have changed the characters’ personalities. Apollo is really angry now, and he used to be my sunshiney baby. One of my favorite characters. I completely consider the Authority’s Apollo and this new Apollo two very different people. The only reason I’m still pulling this series is because I want to support the old characters from the Authority so DC keeps utilizing them. Here, to sum up,

Things that Need More Exposition:

*What is the Shadow Cabinet?

*Why does Stormwatch work for them?

*Where did Apollo and the Midnighter get their powers in a Bendix-less universe?

*What, really, is the Shadow Cabinet’s justification for not choosing the people they did (not) to lead the team?

*What’s the deal with the giant alien horn?

*Did it make the HQ explode somehow, or was that Harry Tanner?

*Why is Tanner so inexplicably evil? What’s with his sudden ambition to “rule” the world?

*What’s up with his timing?

*Why did he want Stormwatch’s files?

*Why did he kidnap the Projectionist?

*Why did the Shadow Cabinet choose to execute Adam One if they wanted him to join the Shadow Cabinet itself?

*What’s the deal with Apollo and the Midnighter having names?

*Why was it necessary, relevant, or good for his character to say that Jack has sex with wells? That’s just…off-putting, dialogue-wise.

*Why do Angie’s nanobites cover her in such a way that she looks like a giant three-year-old with overalls, giant boots and a headband, not to mention the ridiculous shoulderpads?

*Why does the Martian Manhunter know who the Shadow Cabinet guy is? Is this some sort of Justice League crossover? We already had a throwback to Cornell’s other series in the last issue - why can’t he just use that page space to work more on this series, as it so desperately needs it?

Things that Need Less Exposition:

*Discussion of the characters’ names, nicknames, and superpowers.

Not to mention, this series needs a new artist like Apollo needs hair. Example (of art, not necessarily hair):

Ugh why does everyone have these big black wrinkles all over their bodies why are their arms forever at awkward angles why is everyone really unattractive with deep DEEP LINES on their faces seriously what HAPPENED??

Honestly, if the art gets better from here it’ll be like a reverse of what happened with the Authority: starting out with a good artist, and they seemed like a team of extraordinarily good-looking people, and then getting stuck with Frank Quitely and suddenly everyone has trunks for limbs and are perpetually trout-pouting. This series, they just started off hideous. Yikes.

But, yes. DC. ADDRESS ALL OF THIS, PLEASE AND THANK YOU.

As a bonus, if one must tell rather than show in a comic, here is how to do it well:

And this IS done well because it’s done for a purpose in this situation, it’s really the first time we see the character in action, he’s the only one who does it, and it’s made a point of: Apollo has given him grief about his little monologue before, and the Midnighter himself has even complained that he’s said it a million times but none of their enemies pay attention. It’s not done off-handedly every other page, in regular conversation.

Are you listening, Paul Cornell? Are you taking notes?

The admittedly-adorable flirting between Apollo and the Midnighter, and how besotted the Midnighter obviously is, not to mention the hope that surely they wouldn’t go more than five issues without getting to the story or resolving backstory that hasn’t been spoken of has been enough to keep me pulling this title, and for the sake of the characters, I probably still will, unless future writers do something terrible like dragging Apollo through hell and back again, trying to put Baby in the corner, as it were. But regardless of the respect he’s given these two, I’m thinking that a change in writer may be just what this series needs at this point in the story - what there is of it, when people aren’t just standing around talking each other to death.