Our pal Seth Hahne, of GoodOKBad fame, came up with this 31 Days of Comics challenge, one of those things where each day of the month you're given a different category that you then make a choice of a comic to fill that category. I figured it would be a fun bit to do, so here we are! Click here to see each of the categories so far!

We continue with Day 26, which is A Guilty Pleasure Comic

Read on for my pick and then you can share yours!

I have always been good at separating what I enjoy with what I would posit is a "good" comic book, so I really don't have any comics that I feel "guilty" about enjoying, so I guess I should instead go with a book that was particularly unnotable but I still enjoyed it.

So I am going to go with pre-Warren Ellis Stormwatch.



Pre-Ellis Stormwatch was a fascinating comic book in that it was just SO straightforward. I found its lack of ambition sort of charming, really. It was about a group of international superheroes and the book came ready with an easily understandable backdrop. There was a previous squad of heroes on the team and these now-retired heroes acted as trainers to the current squad. In addition, the leader of the team, Battalion, had a secret - his father, once a hero, was now a powerful villain.

They went on adventures and fought your typical 1990s villains and then an interesting event happened. There was a line-wide event called "Images of Tomorrow," where books would leap into the "future" and show the events of a future issue of the book. Steve Seagle wrote Stormwatch #25, which showed a lot of major changes, including Battalion and his second-in-command Diva both dead and Spartan of the WildC.A.T.S now on the team.



Ron Marz took over writing the book with the following issue, #10, and it was Marz's responsibility to get the book to the point where #25 would make sense.



Marz had a good run on the title. He was writing Stormwatch at the same time that James Robinson was writing WildC.A.T.S and the two worked their respective books together a bit.

Then a fill-in writer was brought in for #26...



and then Jeff Mariotte took over for #27...



Honestly, considering three different writers told the story that was originally plotted years earlier by a fourth writer, the four-parter that worked in #25 was actually pretty darn good. Some strong twists.

Again, the book was a nice, straightforward superhero adventure comic. Mariotte introduced some new characters...



One of those characters, Swift, would become a major player in the book under Warren Ellis.



Ellis took over with #37 with artist Tom Raney and gutted the book and re-made it into an even better title, but I imagine that I was one of the few people who was actually familiar with and already a fan of the Stormwatch characters PRE-Ellis.