something queer going on

It's been a long time since I've bought a single-issue comic, and I was never much of a DC reader anyway. But I did read some of The Authority and really liked its characters, and thought they were undermined by the whole "this is a Violent, Grim, and Subversive comic OMG OMG OMG" thing. So I was curious about what DC would do with it, and also extremely impressed by what Paul Cornell had to say about writing queer characters in comics.

So I bought this, and was, I'm sorry to say, underwhelmed. Cornell doesn't do much to make this story interesting on its own terms, as distinct from my own reaction of "Yay, Jack Hawksmoor! Jenny Quantum! Yay, Apollo meeting the Midnighter for the first time, coolness!" Part of the problem, I think, is that Cornell is clearly being required to tie Stormwatch in with the larger events of the DC reboot, which I know nothing about and also don't care. So there are references to things happening in other comics (including a Stan Lee-style footnote!) that I'm not invested in, and this takes time away from what I'd have liked, i.e. more development of the Stormwatch organization and its people. The result is infodumps, although Cornell does his best to mitigate them with lampshading and other devices. Infodumps, however carefully crafted, are inevitably going to drag a story down; they're the opposite of what engages readers (or at least me!) with the story. And when there aren't infodumps, there's the sense of being dropped down into the middle of something and having no idea what's going on. And like I said, I read enough of the Authority to know who most of these people are. Heaven knows what a genuinely new reader would get out of Stormwatch #1.

I intend to keep reading for a while, because I really do want to see what Cornell does with Apollo and the Midnighter, and I want to be supportive of media with queer characters. But I also think that Stormwatch #1 is an example of exactly what drove me out of reading most comics: the companies' obsession with tying everything together into one big story, which is meant to force readers to buy every title. I couldn't afford to do that even if I wanted to, and I resent the attempt, and in any case, it absolutely destroys storytelling. I want to be able to read just Stormwatch and enjoy it. If DC doesn't want me to do that, well, I'll just have to stop reading Stormwatch.

(Just to be clear, this is by no means a DC-only problem. *sighs for what the new X-Factor run could have been*)