I Reads You Review: STORM #1 (2014)

STORM #1
MARVEL COMICS – @Marvel

WRITER: Greg Pak
ART: Victor Ibañez
COLORS: Ruth Redmond
LETTERS: VC’s Cory Petit
COVER: Victor Ibañez
VARIANT COVERS:  Simone Bianchi; Skottie Young
28pp, Color, $3.99 U.S. (September 2014)

Rated T+

My favorite member of the X-Men, Storm, has an eponymous new comic book series, launched as part of the All-New Marvel NOW! initiative.  Storm is written by Greg Pak, drawn by Victor Ibañez, colored by Ruth Redmond, and lettered by Cory Petit.  Of course, you know that Storm a/k/a Ororo Munroe is a Marvel Comics super-heroine and longtime member of the X-Men.  She was created by writer Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum and first appeared in Giant-Size X-Men #1 (cover dated: May 1975).

Storm #1 opens in the country of Santo Marco, where Storm is trying to use her weather-based powers to stop a tsunami, without making the situation worse.  But Suncorp and a local military unit do not want Storm’s help.  Meanwhile, back at the Jean Grey School of Higher Learning, a young mutant girl, Flourish a/k/a Marisol Guerra, has stinging words for Storm and about the school’s mission.

I didn’t expect much from Storm #1, but being that I love, love, love Storm, I was determined to read at least the first issue.  If this first issue is any indication, Storm will finally have the great solo series readers and fans first thought she deserved and should get thirty years ago.

Greg Pak manages to put Storm’s powers on full display, while delving into the human side of her character.  Storm:  the matron, the leader, the mother, the hope, and the salvation, has been as interesting (if not more so) as the superhero side of her.  Pak depicts Storm having to balance her power and her humanity and to find a way to be true to both her principles and to her role as X-Man:  defender and fighter.  Pak does a lot with this character in 20 pages.

Victor Ibañez is a good storyteller, and his warm, vibrant, and earthy style is a good fit for Storm.  Ibañez presents the fight-comics side of the story in a unique way, and his character drama is equally electric.

Dear Greg and Victor, please don’t let Storm #1 be a fluke.

A

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux


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Leroy Douresseaux on Andy Diggle's RAT CATCHER

RAT CATCHER

DC COMICS/VERTIGO

WRITER: Andy Diggle

ARTIST: Victor Ibañez
LETTERS: Jared K. Fletcher
COVER: Lee Bermejo
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1158-5; hardcover
184pp, B&W, $19.99 U.S., $22.99 CAN

I recently read my first Vertigo Crime graphic novel. Released a few weeks ago, it is entitled Rat Catcher. It’s a graphic novel from writer Andy Diggle (The Losers, Hellblazer) and Spanish artist Victor Ibañez, with black and white art. If my count is right, this is the sixth graphic novel released under the “Vertigo Crime” umbrella – the crime graphic fiction shingle of Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics.

Rat Catcher is the first Vertigo Crime comic book that I’ve read, so I can’t say how much it is like the earlier releases. What I can say is that Rat Catcher isn’t crime fiction in that Donald Westlake/Jim Thompson way or even in that Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett way. Rat Catcher is a crime thriller, or more specifically an FBI thriller.

Rat Catcher largely takes place in West Texas, the “badlands of West Texas,” as the story and advertising for the book emphasize. A white supremacist, drug lord named Earl Rawlins rules supreme. Rawlins has just had an informant in his drug distribution system killed, and that killer is someone known as the “Rat Catcher.” The Rat Catcher is sort of like a boogeyman story for FBI agents, a mysterious figure who kills people about to enter the Witness Protection Program after informing on Rawlins.

The chase begins in a burning Federal safe house with a pile of burning bodies inside. Soon two FBI Special Agents, William Lynch and Moses Burdon, are separately on a race to discover the truth. All the players in this game carry secrets, one more deadly than the others.

In a quote for Rat Catcher, Ian Rankin, a novelist who wrote the Vertigo Crime graphic novel, Dark Entries, says that “Moral ambiguities abound.” Not really. In Rat Catcher, murder comes in two flavors: those who got it coming and those who are merely victims. This fast paced narrative focuses on shocking twists and turns and the sudden impact of a bullet, so it doesn’t have time for ambiguity.

Rat Catcher feels like an action movie more than it does crime fiction of the prose or comic book variety. This is not a criticism. Diggle drops his readers into a clever ruse, and then, delivers the action movie thrills better than some action movies do. Although his storytelling is good, artist Victor Ibañez seems almost hard-pressed to keep up with Diggle’s blood-fueled death race with his chunky graphic style. I do feel a bit shitty about saying this: Ibañez isn’t a perfect fit for this story.

I don’t know what other Vertigo Crime comic books are like, but I wonder if they raise hell like Rat Catcher.

B+