Reviewed: Stormwatch: Force of Nature TPB by Warren Ellis, Tom Raney and Randy Elliott

The Plot: A superpowered group of misfits enforces global justice at the command of The Weatherman, who reorganizes Stormwatch into three dedicated mission groups, Stormwatch Prime, Stormwatch Red and Stormwatch Black.

I guess I have to accept one thing; to read and enjoy Warren Ellis's work on the various Wildstorm titles, I have to get used to the constant sensation of coming in in the middle of something.

This trade paperback, reprinting Stormwatch Volume One 37-42, is Ellis's first work on the title which has today morphed into The Authority, one of the best superhero books around.

The tale begins with Henry Bendix reorganizing Stormwatch, bringing in new members such as Jenny Sparks and dismissing others, for one reason or another. As such, the reader is pretty much coming in at the beginning of a new phase, but there is little time to explain who some of these characters are or what their motivations might be.

That's okay, though, because the action gets underway quickly as Stormwatch is dispatched to defeat Father, a Nietzsche-spouting super-madman raising hell on Earth, far below Stormwatch's satellite headquarters. There are a number of other tales in this TPB, all of them well done.

I wanted to read this volume because The Authority, which picks up the story some years down the line from Force of Nature, is one of the best finds I made in comics in 1999. This Stormwatch volume did not disappoint me either.

The tone is not that different from The Authority, which also features cynical superbeings battling mightily against twisted, megalomaniacal lunatics. One key difference is that Jenny Sparks, the leader of The Authority, is here just one of the gang, while The Weatherman, Henry Bendix, orders the team from his lofty position in the satellite.

The characterization of the players who make it to the Authority series is pretty much in place here. There are some interesting revelations, too, about characters such as Hawksmoor and Sparks…bits readers of the current series will find useful to know.

I was intrigued by many of the characters who do not appear in The Authority, such as Winter and Rose Tattoo, and I can only guess at their fates based on the early issues of The Authority.

The art, while not as polished as that on The Authority, services the story well, and in places is very well done (such as the sequences of Hawksmoor racing through his beloved city environments in a number of places).

I suppose now I have to go out and find the other stories that make up this pre-history of The Authority. Because Ellis is telling some great tales in The Authority and Planetary' current issues, and he was doing pretty well as far back as his first run on Stormwatch, as this TPB proves.