On The Cheap: Get Warren Ellis’s Run On ‘Stormwatch’ For $12 Total

This week's debut of The Wild Storm is pretty interesting for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is the return of Warren Ellis to the superhero universe that he helped to shape into the setting of some of the most compelling superhero stories of the past 20 years. Well, kind of a return, I suppose, but while the new series is a reboot from the ground up, there's definitely a history there. And with that history, as ever, comes a sale on Comixology.

Right now, there's a ton of Warren Ellis's work for DC on sale, and while there's a lot of really great stuff in there, my highest recommendation goes to the two volumes collecting his run on StormWatch --- one of the most underrated and influential superhero books of the past two decades.

A lot of the credit for the rise of "widescreen" superheroics tends to go to The Authority, and with good reason. That said, if you really want to see the origins of the type of storytelling that would be reflected across the genre, it starts here --- and in my opinion, it actually holds up a little better than the book that always overshadows it.

Ellis, along with artist Tom Raney, took what had previously been a pretty standard team of reasonably extreme '90s superheroes and restructured it, adding a military command structure, a division into teams that included standard superheroics and black ops assassins, and stories that were built around manipulation, betrayal, and some of the most shocking heel turns in comics.

Oh, and it also introduced characters like Midnighter, Apollo, and Jenny Sparks. Even if you haven't read StormWatch, you might've heard of them.

It's often overlooked by virtue of not having been collected until years after its original run, but StormWatch is more than just a prelude to The Authority. It's one of the best examples of the idea of diving into big, world-shaking action with a clever structure that plays it smart, and if you've ever enjoyed Ellis's take on superheroes, it's one of the best.