Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: NA
Written by: Micah Wright
Penciled by: Whilce Portacio
Inked by: Scott Williams and Sal Regla
Colored by: Whilce Portacio, Jeromy Cox, , Alex Sinclair, and Guy Major
Lettered by: NA
Editor: NA
Publisher: DC Comics/Wildstorm Comics
Released as part of the now DOA “Eye of the Storm” line, “Stormwatch: Team Achilles” was a revamped version of the popular Wildstorm series “Stormwatch” but with a massive twist; rather than consisting of super-heroes the team was made up of an assortment of normal soldiers who have been recruited from across the globe. Granted, the book did feature several token super-heroes (most notably Jukko, the horribly disfigured Finnish soldier) but the book was mainly hyped and written from the point of view of the normal man thrust into a world where you have people like the Authority running around the globe doing whatever they want and not bothering at all about the long-term consequences of their actions.
So we get the new Stormwatch team and their mission, which is to police the world for rogue super-powered beings (or SPBs) for the United Nations. Leading the team is Wildcat villain and supporting cast member Ben Santini, who received the job of leading the team due to his insane dislike for SPBs. It all stems from how he had his knee blown off by the WildCATs while as a grunt in the Black Razor special ops team. But of course Santini has his own agenda for the Stormwatch team, one that, as the series progresses, will put him at odds with his own federal government, who are out to destroy the team (though that’s putting the cart before the horse storywise).
Anyway, Stormwatch V1 collects the first six issues of the series and a special eight page #0 that was originally published in the pages of Wizard Magazine.
Stormwatch Team Achilles #1-3
The first issue has the team getting ready to move into its new headquarters and begin operations. Unfortunately three weeks before move-in day, the UN is attacked by Muslim Super-Terrorists who have begun assassinating everyone in sight and forcing the team to assemble ahead of schedule to save the day. But the sudden appearance of the ultra-violent Captain Marvel-lite super-hero Giant threatens to make an already dangerous situation even worse. And even if they can save the UN and avoid being killed by the obnoxious Giant, how will Santini survive when he’s teleported away to face the shadowy cabal of American born billionaires who were the real masterminds of the terror attack?
Stormwatch Team Achilles “#0”
We get an eight-page story with the focus on Team Achilles snipers Galena Golovin and Charles Pinckney, who are sent into a mission to assassinate a telepathic Bosnian war criminal. Of course Santini has other plans for them, mainly to serve as decoys so that the other members of Stormwatch can lobotomize the bad guy so as to end his threat to the region.
Stormwatch Team Achilles #4
The newest member of Stormwatch, the American-born Isreali soldier/telepath Avi Barak arrives at Stormwatch’s headquarters and gets a crash course introduction to the ways that Ben Santini runs Stormwatch. Avi is called in to scan the mind of the lone surviving member of the terrorist attack from Stormwatch #1-3 and finds out that the SPB activator (being who has the ability to activate latent super-powers in normal people) who was responsible for giving the super-terrorists their powers and also was behind a series of mass murder incidents in the Middle East is hiding in Chechnya. This is a bad thing given that Chechnya is under the “protection” of the Authority, who don’t like their half-assed “liberation” of Chechnya called out. Especially by Jukko, who as we learn later down the road knows first hand the horrors that have come as a direct result of the Authority’s half-assed “changing the world” antics.
Stormwatch Team Achilles #5-6
The main arc of the TPB comes to a conclusion as we get the Authority versus Stormwatch versus the Chechyan super-terrorists versus the Russian army. The battle between the members of Stormwatch and Authority drew much criticism when these two issues were published, due to the way that the members of Stormwatch are easily able to defeat the Authority using a variety of hi-tech weapons. The highlight (or low-lite) is the battle between Midnighter and Jukko, who levels the playing field between the two by deactivating all of Midnighter’s super-fighting skills and then beats Midnighter to a bloody pulp in a rather anti-climatically drawn fight sequence.
Vivisection
A decent collection of issues to set up the series. That’s the good news; the bad news is that the artwork of Whilce Portacio and the assortment of colorists who worked on these six issues/”zero” issue (which technically should be called issue #3 1/2 because it takes place between issues #3 and #4) seriously hamper Micah Wright’s good writing. Granted Whilce’s art will ultimately improve before his departure from the series at the end of the book’s first year but as it stands his work in theses early issues are poor. Characters like Jukko, who is supposed to be a horribly disfigured bald soldier doesn’t look disfigured at all and instead looks like someone who has a skin rash. Also, Blake Coleman routinely goes from being black and white and is often drawn as if he is Jukko’s non-rash covered twin brother.
On other hand is the scripting. It won’t be until the following issues that Micah would find his niche by dropping the anti-super hero rhetoric of the book’s premise for a more political driven style of writing, but the writing here is still good. Volume one also has a ton of unanswered questions, most notably the secret of Santini’s “Teleportor but not really a teleportor” Project Entry device. Also, Micah does an excellent job writing the Authority with this collection of stories and is the first writer to shine the light directly onto the actions of the group and bring up the nasty consequences of their “Kill First and Ask Questions Later” type of super-heroing.
