First Appearance: StormWatch Vol. 1 #1 Base of Operations: SkyWatch StormWatch was created by Jim Lee & Brandon Choi

Resource

• StormWatch Series Index
• List of StormWatch Characters

Overview:
Created as the United Nations's global crisis intervention team, StormWatch was a unit of super-humans and soldiers who worked aboard an orbiting satellite high above Earth known as SkyWatch.

The UN recruited Henry Bendix as leader of the action initiative and was the first Weatherman.


SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!

Publishing History
Stormwatch began in the comic book Stormwatch, published by Image Comics but owned by Jim Lee. Among the main early writers of Stormwatch vol. 1 were Jim Lee, Brandon Choi, H. K. Proger and Ron Marz; among the main early artists were Scott Clark, Brett Booth, Matt Broome and Renato Arlem. The Stormwatch team was run by the United Nations, and overseen from a satellite by their director, "the Weatherman". The Weatherman was one Henry Bendix, who had cybernetic implants connected to his brain to better monitor various world situations and his Stormwatch teams in action. His field commander was Jackson King, aka Battalion. Other members included Fahrenheit (a young American woman, a pyrokinetic), Hellstrike (an Irish police officer, an energy being), Winter (an ex-Russian Spetznaz officer, an energy absorber), Fuji (a young Japanese man, another energy being trapped in a large, super-strong containment suit), and Diva (a young Italian woman with sonic powers).

Later, Ron Marz, who had worked previously on Marvel Comics' Silver Surfer title and had developed Hal Jordan's Green Lantern replacement Kyle Rayner at DC Comics, took on the writing chores. Concurrently, James Robinson of DC's Starman fame was writing WildC.A.T.s. Robinson and Marz, under the editorial direction of Jim Lee, intertwined the storylines of the two books over the course of several months.Also around this time, two two-issue miniseries were released, Stormwatch Team One (written by James Robinson) and WildC.A.T.s Team One (written by Steven Seagle). These two miniseries were also intertwined, and revealed that the groundwork for both teams had been laid by a core group in the mid 1960s, consisting of Saul Baxter (Lord Emp), Zealot, Majestic, John Colt (the template for Spartan), Backlash, a young Henry Bendix and Jackson King's father Isaiah, all of whom would be members of, or would figure prominently in the later Stormwatch and WildC.A.T.s teams. In this series, the term WildStorm, the publishing imprint's codename, was defined as a code term used by the United States Government, "Wild" referring to extra-terrestrial life forms and "Storm" referring to invading forces.

Robinson's WildC.A.T.s run and Marz's Stormwatch run culminated in the WildStorm Rising crossover event, during which, the memberships of both teams were disrupted, with Stormwatch having sustained casualties and the WildC.A.T.s mistakenly believed dead. After WildStorm Rising, Alan Moore took over writing on WildC.A.T.s. Later, after a second imprint-wide crossover, Warren Ellis took over writing Stormwatch with #37 (July 1996).

Warren Ellis' version of Stormwatch was heavily influenced by DC's Vertigo line and its notable authors, such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis. Ellis injected more sexual and horror elements, thinly disguised political commentary, and criticisms of the United States government into the stories. The art was toned down from the more exaggerated '90's style which had dominated all of the early Image Comics, allowing readers to take the book more seriously. It was during this period that Ellis used Stormwatch to introduce the concept of the Bleed, a space between parallel universes which features heavily in Planetary and other comics set in the Wildstorm Universe.

By the end of volume one, Ellis had revised Henry Bendix as a manipulative villain, much as Grant Morrison did with the character of "The Chief" in his run on DC's Doom Patrol.Ellis continued to write the book as it transitioned into Stormwatch volume 2, until the WildC.A.T.s/Aliens crossover of August 1998 — also written by Ellis — saw the Stormwatch team all but massacred by xenomorphs, the creatures from the Alien series of films. Conveniently, most of the Stormwatch characters Ellis had not created were killed off in this story. A group of the survivors became the main cast of Ellis' new series The Authority, including Ellis-created characters Jenny Sparks, Jack Hawksmoor, Apollo, and the Midnighter, as well as Swift (who debuted in Stormwatch v1 #28, written by Jeff Mariotte), and two new characters who were the successors of the Engineer and the Doctor from Ellis' Change or Die storyline. Stormwatch volume 2 ended with one final story taking place after WildC.A.T.s/Aliens, in which the United Nations laid to rest the institution of Stormwatch alongside its fallen members. The very last scene, a conversation between the former members of Stormwath Black, served to introduce the concept of the Authority and promote its upcoming first issue. Other survivors from the original team (including Battalion, Christine Trelane, and Flint) appeared in The Authority, and King and Trelane later became central characters in The Monarchy.


Team History

Stormwatch Vol. 1 & 2
StormWatch was originally a United Nations (UN) "crisis intervention unit" founded as a successor to the Warguard: In the early 1970s, the UN's first orbital space station, Monitor One, was caught in the wake of a mysterious comet. Most of the station's staff were killed by radiation that penetrated Monitor One's shields, but a few survived and were altered by the event, changing form and gaining superhuman abilities. These survivors, including the telepath Isiah King (formerly of Team One) and a ruthless female scientist named Dr. Nychus, became the powerful but uncontrollable Warguard, who later had to be defeated by heroes (including Team One veterans Backlash and Henry Bendix) and placed in stasis for the safety of all mankind.

Out of the ashes of the Monitor One and Warguard disasters, John Windsor founded the Seedling program: A second generation of humans granted superpowers by the comet event (Seedlings) were used as the core of a global peacekeeping force, StormWatch, operating from a giant orbital platform named SkyWatch. The force's first superpowered field unit, StormWatch Prime, comprised Battalion (Jackson King, son of Isiah King), Flashpoint (Foster McClane), Nautika (Maya Royko) and Sunburst (Karl Hansen).The MJ-12, a shadow council of the UN, recruited Henry Bendix as the director (or 'Weatherman') of StormWatch, based on his previous experience with extraterrestrials in Team One. The MJ-12 also enlisted the help of Miles Craven, the director of US intelligence agency International Operations (I/O) and former overseer of Team One. When Marc Slayton (Backlash) tired of Craven's machinations, after his experiences with Team One and Team 7, Craven asked him to spy on the fledgling StormWatch program. Craven told Bendix that Slayton was a security risk, given his past associations with known extraterrestrial Lucy Blaize (a.k.a. Zannah or Zealot), and asked Bendix to take him in and keep an eye on him. When Bendix tried to recruit him, Slayton confessed that he had been asked to infiltrate StormWatch for I/O but had no intention of doing so. Bendix took him in anyway, and put him in charge of training StormWatch's field agents.

Another essential early member of Stormwatch was Christine Trelane, a 'Seedling activator' with the ability to awaken or shut down superpowers in humans affected by the comet event.Flashpoint, Nautika and Sunburst were lost on a mission in Kuwait in 1991 (towards the end of Desert Storm) and presumed dead, but later found to have been captured by the Deathtrap and the Mercs and were rescued from Gamorra by Battalion and new team members.

In addition to the main field team(s), Bendix created a covert superhuman team named 'StormWatch Black'. The earliest known lineup (1983) included The New Romantic (Robert Nathan), Ghetto Blaster (Roger Elliot), Deathrace (Garrett Nolan), Ebony, Ivory and The Urban Cowboy. The last StormWatch Black team comprised Jenny Sparks, Jack Hawksmoor and Swift.

A non-superpowered paramilitary support unit was also formed within StormWatch, named StormForce, a version of which still appears to be active in the US.The original Skywatch station crashed to Earth in 1995 when the Warguard escaped from stasis, and its replacement was piloted into the sun in 1998 to destroy an infestation of xenomorphic aliens.The aliens that invaded the second Skywatch station killed most of StormWatch's superhuman 'officers', excluding Jackson King (who had suceeded Bendix as Weatherman), Flint and the members StormWatch Black. With StormWatch effectively shut down, StormWatch Black went underground to form a new team called The Authority, initially having a similar international mandate to StormWatch. King founded his own group, named The Monarchy.

Stormwatch: Team Achilles
The next incarnation of StormWatch had a considerably smaller budget, and the Skywatch station was not rebuilt. Benjamin Santini, formerly Director of Operations at I/O, became the new Weatherman (following Henry Bendix, Christine Trelane and Jackson King) and led a small team of mostly human operatives specialized in neutralizing superhuman threats ('Team Achilles'), based in the UN headquarters building in New York.

StormWatch was disbanded by the UN following a coup d'etat in which The Authority seized control of the United States. The members of Team Achilles were declared illegal combatants, and went into hiding.

Stormwatch P.H.D. (Post Human Division)
Jackson King later re-founded StormWatch under the sole control of the (re-instated) US government, as a safeguard against future superhuman coups. The Authority's new Doctor resurrected several of King's team-mates who had been killed aboard Skywatch, allowing King to form a new Stormwatch Prime. King also founded a separate initiative named 'Post-Human Division' (PHD) to train law enforcement specialists, both human and superhuman, in low-budget and practical techniques for combating superhuman threats.The new Skywatch is a skyscraper in New York.

Sources:

• Wikipedia: StormWatch

Other incarnatons of Stormwatch:

• Stormwatch: Team Achilles
• Stormwatch P.H.D.

Categories:

WildStorm Titles

WildStorm Teams