The ongoing WildStorm relaunch is still in progress, and the latest book to get an overhaul is poor, beleaguered StormWatch.

StormWatch has always lurched from concept to concept.  Originally they were just a fairly generic UN-sponsored superhero team who played second fiddle to higher profile characters like WildCATS.  Then Warren Ellis wrote it for a while, and ended up turning it into the Authority.  But we don't need two Authorities, so when the StormWatch name was dusted off, it became a military anti-superhero strike force, a sort of less puerile version of The Boys.  And then it was a government superhero team for a bit.

Basically, it's a name that can be applied to virtually anything, as long as it has something to do with the government trying to respond to superhero type things, however loosely.  Christos Gage is the latest writer to wrestle with the concept, and his take is StormWatch: PHD, with the acronym standing for "Post Human Division."

This time round, the idea is that budget cuts have put paid to all the expensive stuff - partly because the Halo Corporation are picking up the slack over in WildCATS, churning out robot superheroes by the dozen.  With those things around, StormWatch are now surplus to requirements as a big superhero team.  Instead, they're now just part of the police, and they're a group of experts who deal with superhero affairs with whatever resources they can scrape together.

So they're the cops who police superheroes, from the look of it.  It's a perfectly viable approach, but haven't we already done this with DC's Gotham Central title?  StormWatch needs to find its own angle, and from the look of it, the approach is that they're not just normal cops dealing with bizarre crimes.  They're people from the periphery of the superhero world, more like a black ops squad in tone.

It's hard to pin down, in any more detail, what this book is going to be like.  The first issue is a gathering-of-the-team book, in which Battalion goes around interviewing the future candidates.  Problem is, there's an awful lot of them, without much in the way of an overall plot.  It ends up terribly bitty, and rather than feeling as though I'm meeting the characters, I feel more as if somebody's running over a summary with me.  There are some interesting ideas in there, but they're all fighting for space, and nothing really comes to the fore.

As a concept, it's potentially interesting.  But the first issue doesn't draw me in.  Perhaps it'll hit its stride once the team-gathering phase is out of the way.

Rating: B-

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