–SPOILERS BELOW–

I don’t know if anyone’s heart is in this comic at all. The reason I say that is that Starlin, and Milligan before him, are two writers I respect and enjoy most of the time. Not here.

There were glimmers of hope and interesting characters in Cornell and Milligan’s runs, but it got bogged down by infighting, misunderstanding, and deception.

So Jim Starlin, an experienced cosmic storyteller, came on and scrapped the entire team, including some interesting new characters with interesting powers.
Starlin at one point spoke through the Shadow Lord to essentially say “This whole thing is a giant disaster lets start over.”

An aside– it speaks to how inconsequential Stormwatch is, that amidst all the buzz about killing kids like Damian and Cliff, nobody cared that their contemporary preteen Jenny Quantum was murdered too, and replaced by a blonde white 16 year old.

Now issue #21 has the Shadow Cabinet already planning to kill the team again with the help of Lobo, who is equally as incompetent as he is the most powerful force in the universe. As the shadow cabinet explains, Lobo is such a badass rebel, he doesn’t comply with even the craziest multidimensional science.

It’s basically the Lobo, Jenny Soul, Shadow Lord show here, with all the other characters standing with their arms out in the middle of a war between two barely distinguishable lizard races.

One problem with Stormwatch is that it really doesn’t belong in the DCU. That’s why Martian Manhunter bounced, and this Lobo thing seems awkward. Another problem is that there is no adventure.

I’m fine with Stormwatch being a separate, covert entity in the DCU, as long as they do interesting things, but with it desperately trying to be important, it’s pretty clear that it is trying to be something it’s not. Stormwatch has been literally just floating in space for a while now.

The art is at its worst here too. It looks like Neal Adams inking Michael Avon Oeming, to the worst effect possible. Sometimes people just aren’t put together well or things are colored wrong. There are no backgrounds a lot of the time, and bad backgrounds (see cover) a lot of the time too.

The speech balloons of the Shadow Lords are a horrible, bad magenta gradient making hard to read, and then connected by solid magenta lines. Not to mention that Stormwatch’s Daft Punk leader gets a golden speech balloon. It looks bad.

It’s too little too late for the most disjointed and ugly book in the New 52, and all the Volcanic Absinthe in the DCU won’t make it better. I really tried.