2 out of 5

I get where this was coming from, and appreciated / appreciate the disgruntled smirk motivating it, but that same causal spark – and perhaps some lack of editorial guidance – made this 3-of-7-intended-issues series fall flat: it felt immature, and was purposefully immature, and was smart enough to embrace that immaturity, but not smart enough to ultimately escape the Catch-22 loop of such a thing. While all the Watchmen-esque extras built into it are signs of the fun Chuck and crew were having, they couldn’t rescue the book from the ultimate sin of being… pretty boring.

WorldWatch came during Austen’s rather unfair ousting from public favor at Marvel and DC. He’d made a brazen splash with U.S. War Machine, and then his name was everywhere for a bit; his X-Men run forever has an ignominious taint, the publishing of which preceded fans collectively getting sick of the everywhereness of Chuck’s name. And so he left Marvel and DC.

I remember spotting WorldWatch on the rack at my LCS and chuckling; it’s soap opera tagline and nearly naked cover figure – WorldWatch’s leader, War Woman – told me that Chuck was running his shtick to a humorous extreme: give the comic fans what they want. This is mixed in to a large chunk of Austen’s mainstream work, blended with his take on humans as, by default, sex-driven creatures. You can lean into that for lots of relationship drama and cheesecake, and X-Men – already a soap opera – was a great place, or so Chuck thought, to toy with that. The “toying” is, I think, what’s easy to miss in Austen’s writing, as, yes, his character are simple creatures, but he does appreciate that layered on top of that simplicity are lots of confusing and conflicting emotions and actions; push and pull levers in that equation and you can go back to Chuck’s sex comedies like Strips, or find more complex works like The Eternal, or Flywires.

But now Chuck had a chip on his shoulder. His books sold well but he was hated; clearly his “give the fans what they want” worked, but they were upset when he made it too surface level. And so wouldn’t it be funny if he made a book that was just completely surface level, and kind of promoted for exactly that? 18 and Up on the cover; Tom Derenick draws big boobs and big muscles, and we get all the heroes banging one another and 0% saving the world, because they’re too busy walking around naked. This is meta-wrapped as Chuck and team “adapting” War Woman’s autobiography, allowing for some self-aware commentary throughout – War Woman’s narrative – and extras like tongue-in-cheek bios; coverage of the WorldWatch animated series (the artists got distracted drawing all the boobs); the history of a completely fictional Archie porno comic series; and even an announcement that Austen was being fired as writer in favor of “new” writer Samuel Clemens. When you stand back from that, it’s pretty cute snark – The Authority and The Boys without any veneer of trying to write an actual comic book.

Er, except Chuck did try to make an actual comic book.

War Woman’s autobiography is apparently covering the downfall of WorldWatch; there’s supposedly a story evolving here. I can kind of imagine how this went: Chuck may have had the thought of doing some kind of evolved takedown of comics prior to his Marvel / DC experiences, or he thought of War Woman and etc. as an eff-you joke on the self-denying delusions he saw in comic fandom, and then got excited at the thought of turning that eff-you joke into a legit commentary on the industry. Either way, it’s the aforementioned Catch-22: you can’t totally take the piss out of something and then want to demonstrate how to take a piss with it at the same time. There is no moment in WorldWatch that isn’t affected by this conflict, where it all feels like, y’know, an okay joke that could support a one-shot – skimpy outfits, Wonder Woman proxy likes to bang the bad guy, sure – but then it’s written with the intention of making you pay attention to an actual story. …Except that story is also written with the same eff-you energy.

This very likely could have paid off well over the four remaining issues we never got, but seeing as how the first three managed to neither be all that funny or all that interesting, it was a tough gamble.

With a bit of space between motivating events and the book, I think Chuck could have made this into a pretty excellent satire. I’d like to pitch it as, at least, an interesting misfire, but it’s so noncommittal to either of its agendas that’s it’s hard to even sell it as a curio. At the very least, I think you can tell that there was an idea at work, and a fair amount of energy put into realizing that idea. And if you told me Chuck was returning to this to finish off the series, I’d be right back in line to see it through to its end.