So, one surprising thing and two reassuring things from Stormwatch.
Surprising: “Force” is not a new character at all, it’s Fuji with a different name! :D Saved from Lobdell making him into a low ranking villain lackey in Superboy >.>
Reassuring 1: While disappointed with the alien abduction origin (was hoping for super soldiers again) and the fact that they still have real names (and Apollo now has a LAST name too, Pulaski) they do share an origin, and they did escape from their creators… though not at the same time, so that’s good(ish). Also, Apollo is beautiful and dislikes clothes, as it should be, and he and Midnighter are already together. It was SUCH a relief to see Midnighter in his old costume again. Apollo’s is a bit different, but I am fine with it.
Reassuring 2: Though difficult to show with just a couple panels, Starlin NAILED Angie’s personality, she’s awesome again :D Also she started out with no nanites over her skin, presumably to show that she is not, in fact, a robot or cyborg with very little human left, like Milligan was writing her as. (seriously, she was all metallic in flashbacks to BEFORE the Devolver while IN BED)
That’s not to say there weren’t things I didn’t like, I’m still very unsure of Jenny Soul, and I don’t like that Hellstrike is no longer sentient gas, and am sad to see Hawksmoor go… but… if that’s what I had to trade for rescuing Angie, Apollo and Midnighter, the return of Skywatch (although different from in Wildstorm in many respects, and with some aspects of the Carrier thrown in) and The Bleed, I’ll take it.
Also, it’s good to see Lobo’s being rescued from the butcher job Liefeld did on him in Deathstroke…
I am SO happy to see Apollo, Midnighter and Engineer be more like the versions of the characters that I adored in the original Wildstorm series…one issue in and I’m already thinking that Starlin is the perfect choice to be handling this series, I LOVED the way he wrote these three
SO good to see Apollo and Midnighter being an awesome couple again and seeing the Engineer being her fabulous self instead of being all ‘Skynet’ and wanting to start a robot apocalypse because of…reasons O.O
Yeah. I’ve stuck through this trainwreck of a series since the beginning, every time i thought I was going to drop it, another creative team was announced, and I ended up sticking around, in hopes that maybe THIS time they’d get it right… and Milligan wasn’t bad at the beginning, but it unravelled a whole lot towards the end there… So then Jim Starlin was announced and I ended up sticking it out yet again… I wasn’t really sure what to expect with Starlin. Sci-fi is kinda his specialty, to put it mildly, so I knew that part was a good fit, but… I’ve read stuff by him before, but it was from like the 80’s, I hadn’t read any of his more recent work. I was worried that it may be really dated and he wouldn’t capture the sort of edge they needed… but, though a bit exposition heavy (and guilty of telling rather than showing sometimes) I think he did pretty good, and I suspect the exposition was just to get things rolling the way he wanted as quickly as possible, and won’t be a permanent feature. My 3 favorites are Apollo, Midnighter and Angie, and he did the best with them, so I was thrilled. Angie especially needed fixing SO BADLY (not to mention resurrecting) so it was good that he focused most of the non-exposition bits on her, to show everyone the old Angie was finally back. Apollo and Midnighter only got one page where they interacted with eachother, but it had the right feel to it. Kind of an understated casualness to their relationship, it felt almost like how Warren Ellis wrote them, which is the highest praise I can give.
The art by Yvel Guichet is not spectacular, but I get the sense that there is a good synergy between him and Starlin, it feels like they are very much on the same wavelength here, AND I think he’s an Authority fan. So we won’t have the art actively fighting the story the writer is trying to tell, like I think happened with Miguel Sepulveda, and he understands what the characters are all about, and I will take competent art that serves and compliments the story and characters over super-pretty art that fights it any day.
The real test will be next issue of course, to see how things go now that the info-dump is out of the way, but this issue put me at ease and I’m thinking that maybe we will FINALLY have this series done right.
Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/47205366541
No comments:
Post a Comment