The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1121: Supreme #16, July 1994

Nope. I was right. Random superhero fight.

Yesterday's issue was an aberration, I think, a fluke in which all of a sudden there was growth and character development - Supreme was becoming a rounded individual. Maybe it's every two issues....?

The appearance of Stormwatch in today's issue reminds me of the idea of a recuperation of the old Image titles through the series they would one day become. Stormwatch is pretty basic for the first while, until Warren Ellis gets his dark hands all over it and it becomes some of the best superhero stuff out there. Seeing Hellstrike and Fuji and everyone here was a nice reminder to me of what they would eventually become. And of their grisly fate.

Though perhaps that's been retconned now?

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 684: Stormwatch #32, January 1996

*sigh* What can one ever really say about the median Image comic of the mid-Nineties? It's confusing, but let's chalk that up to my coming in halfway through a story. It's violent, but that's to be expected. There is one nice little moment where a "terrorist" asks if the revolutionaries during America's war of independence weren't also terrorists, but then that's stifled somewhat by a bit of misinformation about the state of the Middle East for "thousands" of years (see this Tumblr post for more info).

What I do find interesting about Stormwatch is that the whole idea of a United Nations super-powered strikeforce is very difficult to manage. What happens when an organization that's ostensibly about equality between countries becomes a global superpower in and of itself. Though it may be unconsciously, I think this question is exactly what Stormwatch wrestles with, is certainly what Ellis and Raney think through in their run, and it leads directly to The Authority, which is the logical outcome of this kind of thinking. Once SPBs (super-powered beings) are shown that they can operate outside of the sovereign laws of countries, it's only a small step to go slightly further, and operate outside of the boundaries of international sovereign laws.

Something else tomorrow. Onward!