Stormwatch

48 years ago - Jenny Sparks creates Stormwatch, a secret organization designed to protect Earth and the barriers between dimensions.
Membership: Jenny Sparks, 25-year-old Jack Marlowe, 30-year-old Toshiro Mishawa, Richard Occult

44 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown discover deep-sea portals through the bleed to opposite dimensions at war with each other. They broker a peace between the alternate dimensions, and work with Stormwatch to contain and seal the portals.
Membership: Jenny Sparks, 29-year-old Jack Marlowe, 34-year-old Toshiro Mishawa, Richard Occult

40 years ago - Stormwatch has their final battle with with interdimensional android warlord Tao. Richard Occult, 38-year-old Toshiro Mishawa & 33-year-old Jack Marlowe are killed. Marlowe manages to use his own brain's neural map to overload Tao's network, and store himself in the alien supercomputer. Toshiro's inert micronanite colony is collected by S.H.A.D.E., while Marlowe uses Tao's biosynthetic android bodies to build his labs under New York. Jenny Sparks retreats to Great Britain and begins to work as a private investigator, regularly working with British Intelligence.

3 years ago - 33-year-old Manchester Black's powers return. He escapes the Checkmate facility imprisoning him, and attempts to reassemble the Elite so they can kill Superman, Bunny's reactivation allows Jenny Sparks and Zealot to return to this dimension, where Jenny wrests control of the Voidship. Only 25-year-old Haruto Satou (Rampotratek) joins Black, as Angela Spica & 38-year-old Paul Booker side with Jenny. Satou is killed by Booker. The Elite are fractured, and Black takes his own life. Booker joins the Doom Patrol, wanting to better control his abilities. Jenny creates a new Stormwatch, using the Voidship to protect Earth and the barriers between dimensions.
Membership: Jenny Sparks, Zealot, Augustus Freeman IV, 17-year-old Raquel Eruin, Jack Marlowe, 26-year-old Angela Spica

2 years ago - Xanthe Zhou helps free the members of Stormwatch trapped in the Spirit World. They join them in defeating Kaizen Gamorra, and become the newest member of Stormwatch. They track the warlord Helspont to Zealot's home dimension where he is preparing to stage an invasion. They consult with J’onn J’onzz, and together they dismantle the Daemonite armada, stranding Helspont in a dead dimension.
Membership: Jenny Sparks, Zealot, Augustus Freeman IV, 18-year-old Raquel Eruin, Jack Marlowe, 27-year-old Angela Spica, 23-year-old Xanthe Zhou

1 year ago -Stormwatch make themselves public when they join the battle against Mageddon.
Membership: Jenny Sparks, Zealot, Augustus Freeman IV, 19-year-old Raquel Eruin, Jack Marlowe, 28-year-old Angela Spica, 24-year-old Xanthe Zhou

Noteworthy Teams

Original Members

Current Members

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Stormwatch is absolutely a team that appears in DC, but that's really the least interesting thing about it. In the same way that characters from Quality, Fawcett and Charlton comics have all been adapted into the world of DC, Wildstorm was a whole additional catalog of characters that DC acquired and (slowly) integrated into their main continuity. The big difference here is that most of us were actually AROUND when the original non-DC versions of these characters were published. What's more, they were easily the most popular comics on the shelf for a really long time. This leaves us with some really strong opinions, so we're going to be digging in with both hands here to create a version of Stormwatch that takes everything we love about this comic world, and finding an ideal way to incorporate them into the rest of DC continuity.

Wildstorm's Comic History

The invention of Image Comics is, at this point, essentially a comic book legend in and of itself, but to summarize a very interesting story very briefly; a group of really popular Marvel artists left to start their own company where they all owned their own characters and built one of the most successful comic publishing brands in history, and exerted a gravitational pull on the entire industry like a passing rogue planet. They all originally shared one big continuity, but over time they sort of shrank back into their own disparate worlds. Jim Lee in particular started out with a team built to be very similar to his X-men, the Wild C.A.T.S, and then a year later with another book called Stormwatch, both written originally by Brandon Choi. The former was a team of alien hybrids, the Kherubim, engaged in an ongoing war with their enemies, the Daemonites. The latter was a UN sanctioned team of heroes operating with full oversight.

Both books went on for some time and had some really stellar writers taking over both series. There's a particular vibe in these Image comics where, because the real focus was on the art, the writers were free to spin some really crazy stuff. Character origins and histories were delightfully unhinged in their complexity and expansive plots unfurled with rube goldbergian complexity. It was great.

Jim Lee actually sold the Wildstorm catalog of characters to DC in 1998, but they were still being published as a standalone universe separate from the DC continuity. Stormwatch writer Warren Ellis had been slowly morphing the book into a new shape. He added some new characters, and also told stories that implied a very expansive history including other heroic legacies that we hadn't SEEN but now retroactively existed. A crossover book called WildC.A.T.S/Aliens was published in '98, and at first Warren Ellis thought it was a dumb idea, until he was told he could kill any character he wanted. He used it to clean house, literally killing practically every remaining Stormwatch members he hadn't personally created.

What followed was a new series that is probably what Wildstorm is most known for. Ellis assembled his own characters, both the ones he'd invented for Stormwatch and also legacy versions of some of the heroes he'd invented in single stories, into a new team that no longer operated under the jurisdiction of the UN. They were now an autonomous team of heroes operating independently. They were structurally similar to the Justice League, but with a few exceptions managed to avoid being pastiches of classic League members, making them something original. What's even more important is that the artist on the series was Bryan Hitch, who turned the book into a gorgeous big-budget action movie. This is, if you ask me, the true lasting impact of the Authority, that practically all superhero comics in the decades sense have been aspiring to have their action sequences look as good as the ones here.

The Ellis/Hitch Authority lasted for 12 issues, before being taken over by other creators, but the core story of the team had essentially been told. The new flagship property of Wildstorm, as DC worked to slowly figure out how to incorporate their new characters into their main continuity, a lot of those efforts seems to center around that team, along with a few popular WildC.A.T.S like Grifter or Voodoo. When DC rebooted it's continuity in 2011 with the New 52, one of the new series was Stormwatch, which reimagined the team as a sort of secret organization that had operated behind the scenes for centuries, even tying into their Demon Knights series, suggesting that the medieval team in that book was actually the first Stormwatch. There was a real attempt being made here to make something that could work. It was a valiant effort, but ultimately the New 52 suffered from such incredibly poor editorial oversight that this idea ultimately didn't stick.

The Authority and Stormwatch remain a sort of elusive idea in DC's canon, a concept with a lot of fan goodwill that hasn't really been successfully capitalized on yet. The characters all are now understood to exist within the larger DC canon, but the events of their books did not, so it's a little hard to really wrap your head around exactly who they're supposed to be.

This may be changing, though... James Gunn included an Authority movie in his initial pitch for his slate of DC movies, and the Engineer was actually among the characters depicted in his Superman movie.

Our Stormwatch Story

If we're going to create a fan-timeline for DC, and if our central tenant is to make it look like DC the way we think it SHOULD be, that includes the Wildstorm characters. How though do you DO that? Even DC hasn't successfully done it yet.

For a long time, what we really struggled with was that we're actually huge Wildstorm fans. There is a particular tone and style going on here that feels vital to preserve, but you can't just one-to-one transpose these characters like you did with The Quality or Charlton comics, because these guys have an absolutely massive internal continuity of their own. Trying to add the WildC.A.T.S, with their dense generational alien war, to the ongoing DC mythology would be like trying to add the X-Men to the MCU. (Best of luck, folks.) What's more; some of the really great characters and teams are just flat out incompatible with DC. The Authority just can't exist in a world with the Justice League, they would be the bad guys. Midnighter and Apollo are fun Batman & Superman allegories, but if you try to put them in the main continuity they just start to look like a nondescript xerox of a xerox.

What we need to do, then, is pull way, way back and look down at this whole catalog of characters and stories, and try to determine what actually needs to be here. Which characters, certainly, but also how can we recreate the tone and scope of Wildstorm without directly transposing them?

It really starts with Jenny Sparks. The leader of the Authority and pretty inarguably the main character, her long history is a fantastic framing device we can use to articulate Wildstorm's influence over the timeline. We know they were there, because Jenny was there. We can make Stormwatch her team, assemble it entirely around her. Also, there is a concept in Wildstorm called 'the bleed', which is basically the phlogiston between alternate dimensions. Note, we're saying alternate dimensions here, not multiverses. It's not like, everything is the same but everyone wears a hat. This is a concept that does creep up within standard DC and here in our project, but there really isn't anyone policing it. That can be Stormwatch's focus, something that feels decidedly Wildstorm and gives them a sort of outsider place to play in, while also feeling comfortably part of the larger continuity as opposed to just being slapping into it.

We're going to build the history and membership of this team very carefully. We're looking at Wildstorm characters that represent the fun and complexity of the original stories, but we're also going to find DC characters that complement that energy. We want characters that feel outsider-y, sort of main story-adjacent, but also deeply innovative and fun. Also, characters with a ton of history, because one major part of Wildstorm that often gets overlooked is that it's built with a deep, dense lore, and we want our team to give us that feeling.

I really hope you guys enjoy this, it was a lot of fun to put together, and we think in the end we have a great take on how to adapt Wildstorm into DC that gives them both the focus they deserve.

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