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Warren Ellis, �Stormwatch� (Multiple titles)

Started July 14 � Finished July 15, 2004; 304 pages. Posted 21 July 2003

I just saw League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the other day. I really wasn�t expecting myself to go to this. The commercials were lame, showing nothing more than Sean Connery saying �Shut up!� in full Scottish baroque, and then punching some guy. Then they tried to expand the selling point by saying it was by the director of Blade, which is really not much of a selling point. Even when I found out the film was based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore, I couldn�t work up much excitement about it.

Then the review came out in the Merc, done by the guy I trust for the most part. He loved it, and gave it three and a half stars — just shy of perfection. I was actually kind of stunned. And then I found a way to get to the film via a fan of this site, if you can believe that, so I said what the hell. And it was pretty good, though I�m still not convinced that it�s worthy of three and a half stars. But I�m also not convinced that it�s not and that quite a lot of praise, coming from me.

Surprisingly, neither Joe nor I babbled on incessantly in these journals about how great X-Men 2 was. And X-men 2 was fucking great — a complex and smart story that never got bogged down in either philosophical talks or fight scenes (something Matrix Rebloated did both of). But the truly amazing thing about both X-men 2 and League was the amount of characters involved whilst still having enough of a story line to encompass them all.

And that�s where this series by Warren Ellis fails. This is yet another grouping of superhero types, ala X-men, Avengers, Justice League, etc., but none of them are memorable enough to stick in your craw. I just finished 304 pages with these people, and I can only remember the names of two or three of the characters. (To be fair, I can only remember the actual names of about four of the X-men team. What the hell is Rogue�s �real� name?)

But that�s bad only for the long-term effect, as I was having loads of fun reading this as it happened, and since I had the purdy pictures to go along with it, I didn�t get lost in the complex story line. It�s only now that I feel the series wasn�t as good as it should be, just because the characters weren�t memorable enough.

Last week I saw the History Channel�s documentary on comic books, and there was an explanation that Stan Lee thought people would have an easier time remembering the characters if the first and last name were similar: Matt Murdock, Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Scott Summers, etc.

At first I thought that was lame. As it turns out, he may have been right.


Rating: Both are worth used.

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