Stormwatch 44 Watchmen homage variant cover by Mark Irwin

Bouncy bouncy bally 

I tore the leg off my dolly

my mother came out

gave me a clout

And turned my petticoat inside out!

Cool homage cover and thanks for sharing your love for the series and it's predecessors in the description, I never read this so it's nice to learn about and I'll definately be adding it to my future reading list

Watchmen cover designs are classic, so it's hard to NOT like homages to them. It's interesting, as you note, that they gave the cover assignment to a guy who was known as an inker, but it's also not a rarity. As I understand it, Irwin is doing an homage of an homage. He is homaging a cover that Tom Raney drew, which itself was an homage to a Watchmen cover.  Either way, this is a fun piece.

By the way, when I returned to comics early i nthe new millenium, I read a Wizard article on series that were must reads and I ended up reading The Authority because of it, but as you say, other readers have mentioned that Stormwatch was also really good even though it wasn't pushed to the same degree. I never read it, but that was primarily because after reading The Authority from start to finish, I was disappointed that it started off really strong but then seemed to fall apart in the second half, so trying out the series from which The Authority was spawned and was considered to not be as good, just didn't appeal to me.

When/if you read Stormwatch (vol.1) 37 to 50, you feel like you have read something cleverly built/closed and quite intense. In that sense it felt more structured than the Authority which was more "open" in scope as it was about facing bigger cinematic threats in every arc.

Rule to live by: all creepy little dolls are planning to kill you

That's interesting, because if it is only the final 14 issues that are the best, then I might actually find myself willing to try it out someday.

Great pick up! All I could do was watch from the sidelines.

If it's also the first panel of the story, then it's a successful homage.  This could also be a Breaking Bad homage if you watched the episode with the Jane's dad as the air traffic controller.