I have the deluxe HC collecting all 12 issues (picked up at Ollie's a while back), which is why I nominated it. I just hadn't had a chance to dive in yet. I did last night, reading the first 6 issues. I probably won't get to the last 6 until this weekend sometime, most likely Sunday). I prefer to withhold comments until I have read it all, but I will say the absolute unrelenting grimness makes it a tough sled at times. It's interesting, but not quite engaging so far. Civil War era Marvel is not a favorite of mine, so that doesn't help, and I hadn't realized that was the backdrop when I picked up the book. The series was recommended to me by some folks whose tastes and mine have a large intersection if we were doing a Venn diagram, but I am beginning to suspect this one might fall outside that intersection.
Weston's art is beautiful and detailed, but it feels a bit static to me, lacing a bit of the dynamism that my favorite artists have in spades. Pretty to look at, but it doesn't pull me through the pages or the story. The narrative storytelling is absolutely clear, so that's not the issue, it just doesn't have that certain something that propels me through the issue. JMS has always been hit or miss with me. When he hits, I really love his stuff, but when he misses it becomes a slog for me. I like B5 and Midnight Nation, Rising Stars less so, and kind of on the fence on his Marvel stuff (I like things about his Spidey and Thor runs, but his take on Doc Strange in the Strange mini is perhaps my least favorite take on that character ever published). When I like JMS least though is when he gets a big self-indulgent in his writing and everybody is wallowing in their misery. The Twelve feels like this half way in. In his better stuff, it sets up redemptive arcs for at least some of the characters (as we see often in B5 and saw in Midnight Nation), so there's a chance this could go that direction still and I may find I like it a fair bit more after its concluded than I do halfway through, but aside from the POV character of the Phantom Reporter, I don't even see the seeds of redemptive arcs being planted in any of the character arcs, just unrelenting misery in the their attempts to find a place in the world 60 years later.
So I haven't given up all hope of liking this, but its not trending well 6 issues in. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, it's just turning into the kind of story I don't much enjoy reading these days.
-M