Cream of the Comics – 3/14/2007

Stormwatch PHD #5
written by Christos Gage, art by Doug Mahnke

About two weeks ago, I was in the shop picking up my books, and one of the guys from the small mob that lives there pointed out that the book I was picking up was by Christos Gage. He and I briefly chatted on Gage’s excellent track record, starting off with his fantastic Deadshot mini, his recent Batman work, and before that, how he was writing episodes for Law & Order: SVU (the best of the Law & Orders, really). We dug issues 1-3 out of the back-issue bins, but I’m still missing 4, which now leaves a gaping hole in my soul.

The premise is that the Stormwatch: Post-Human Division (AKA superhero division) features a team of (mostly) humans tasked with taking down super-powered bad guys. The team does have one guy that’s half evil alien, and there’s also the chick who used to have heat powers, but lost them. The rest of the team is just badass humans, mostly with a law enforcement background. Christos Gage does some of his best work here, bringing out his strength of writing cops from Law & Order and melding those skills into a comic story, creating a fantastic book that reads more like a cop drama than you’d expect.

And Doug Mahnke’s no slouch on the art either. He’s constantly called to go back and forth between scenes of a super-villain mayhem slaughter, training scenes in a gym, and then scenes of a lab where a woman’s body has been splattered everywhere. His art matches his most work on the Frankenstein mini, but if you have a sharp memory, you’ll recognize the name as the original artist of The Mask. All in all, you’ve got a quality creative team putting together a really great book. Get onboard while it’s still on the ground floor.