Well, we’re miles behind with reviews, aren’t we?  Axis finished up this week, as did the Annuals story “The Secret Life of Eva Bell”, and Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy.  Volume 2 of Magneto actually wrapped up last month, it’s been over a week since Storm #6 came out – which wouldn’t be so bad, except the first volume collects issues #1-5.  We’ll catch up with these over the coming weeks.

Let’s start with Storm.  Unlike some of the X-books I’ve written about lately, Greg Pak and Victor Ibanez’s series has some vocal support.  That takes the form of a pre-emptive campaign to save it from cancellation, which, given that the November issue was at 122 on the Diamond charts, is hardly an unreasonable concern.

Storm is undoubtedly a step up from the page-filler that we’re seeing in the lower-tier X-Men titles these days.  It’s a book of ideas, and often interesting ideas.  Yet I have to admit to finding it hard to warm to, though it’s not altogether easy to put my finger on why.

This is one of several X-Men solo titles launched this year, featuring characters who don’t obviously lend themselves to the solo title format.  To state the obvious, Storm was not conceived with a solo feature in mind; she was designed to function as part of a team cast, and, in fact, has largely been defined by her role within the team, as peacemaker, mother-figure, leader and eventually veteran authority figure.  There isn’t a ready-built concept for what a Storm solo book is about.  And X-Men has been using her as the steady, calm voice of experienced reason, to give Rachel Grey something to react against.

So Greg Pak’s primary concern in these five issues is to establish his take on the character and find some sort of angle to provide a springboard for her own stories.  He does that with four separate stories (issues #4-5 are a two parter), which have no particular through line, but seem to be an exercise in defining the character in relation to various scenarios.

Issue #1 is most explicitly concerned with yanking her in a different direction.  In plot terms, it’s extremely basic: Storm goes to Santo Marco, where the government is anti-mutant (in a transparent parallel for homophobic African governments), but the X-Men are trying to be diplomatic and not rock the boat.  Later, a girl at the X-Men’s school, Marisol, accuses her of being a sellout because she’s signed up to the X-Men’s agenda instead of helping her own community.  She decides that the kid has a point and goes back to Santo Marco to help out with the recovery effort after all.  This goes on to inspire the locals to stand up against land developers, but that bit is pretty much an afterthought to designed to make clear that she made the right decision.

The central point here lies in Marisol’s claim that the school exists to “indoctrinate” pupils in the X-Men’s ideology, and that “this whole thing is framed as people of tremendous privilege gifting things to the poor”.  The privilege claim is highly dubious as a matter of the X-Men’s internal logic – their central concept, after all, is that they’re a persecuted minority – but there’s validity to it in a more meta sense.  They do indeed get to live in a lovely (if increasingly chaotic) mansion originally built by old money, dispensing charity to people who have little choice but to accept their handouts, and there is obvious truth in the idea that the X-Men spend their time going around telling mutants how to live, and indeed how they ought to respond to the bigotry they’re faced with.  (And that’s before we even get to the fact that, for much of their history, the X-Men’s basic advice on that topic has been “keep your head down, bear injustice with fortitude, and wait for things to get better” – not exactly a plan of action with a stellar track record in the real world.)

Storm’s response to this, incidentally, is that the X-Men are merely providing their pupils with tools that they can use as they see fit – a theme that then recurs in issue #3, when she goes back to her old home in Kenya to see Forge work on a weather control machine to help with the drought in the same way she used to.  That story also hammers the importance of charity taking a form which gives people agency.  Issue #2, I suppose, is also arguably somewhat concerned with the idea of letting people make their own choices, but it really isn’t, for reasons I’ll come to.

At any rate, it’s not a theme present in issues #4-5; if there’s a recurring theme to Pak’s take on Storm, it seems instead to be about making her a woman of principle in a world of compromise.  So we get her standing up to the anti-mutant government rather than being diplomatic; looking for a random homeless girl just because she feels someone ought to; destroying Forge’s aid machine rather than have his charity take a form that offends her principles; and ultimately breaking off contact with Yukio rather than support her in a criminal enterprise that Yukio justifies on pragmatic grounds.

Ibanez does a pretty good job of humanising and grounding the characters, while retaining the scale needed for the weather set pieces – a necessary step if we’re going to dial Storm back from “goddess” mode and make her work as a lead in her own right, and particularly so given that Pak evidently has no interest in pitting her against mega-powered characters.  She sometimes looks a bit awkward when in flight, but that’s a relatively minor thing.  Visually, it’s a very solid book, good with quickly establishing new characters and settings in each story.

So we’ve got a reasonable attempt to retool the character to function as a lead, we’ve got some interesting ideas in here, and we’ve got an under explored critique of the X-Men’s set-up.  And yet.

I think my issue with the series is that it feels a little too sure of its moral position.  After her encounter with Marisol in issue #1, Storm never again really seems to experience any moral dilemmas in this book; she just knows what’s right and stands up for it.  It’s not as if there even seem to be any adverse consequences for choosing principle over pragmatism in this series – issue #1 goes the other way and bends over backwards to show that wonderful things result – but where’s the drama in choosing to be principled unless it comes at a cost?  Issue #2 sees Storm choosing to let some runaways go their own way instead of fetching them home – but only once she’s come to agree with them anyway, so it’s not as if she’s faced with deferring to another’s right to choose.

Issue #3 has perhaps the most genuine dilemma, but also the least satisfying resolution.  Forge is building a weather machine to help produce rain for Storm’s old community in Kenya, in a pretty transparent attempt to get back in her good graces.  He wants to lock off the higher settings because they’ll be dangerous; the locals are offended that they’re not being left to decide these things for themselves.  This is a genuine tension from mutual distrust, but Storm’s solution is just to destroy the machine and insist that by the time it’s rebuilt everyone will probably have sorted out the problem (apparently because they’ll all trust each other by that point, but this seems like wildly utopian thinking).  This, to me, feels like a particularly bad case of a story that doesn’t have a proper ending so much as a grand gesture that feels vaguely ending-like.

Incidentally, that story finally takes the very welcome step of retconning away the idea that local farmers worshipped young Storm as a goddess.  However it may have looked in the 70s, this has had a distinct sense of The Gods Must Be Crazy for years now – rural Kenyans are not some sort of undiscovered remote tribe, after all.  Pak’s version simply has them indulging the crazy girl who can help out with irrigation, which is much better.  It does introduce a further complication for Storm’s own character, by making her “goddess” identity into a personal delusion rather than a collective one.

Finally, in issues #4-5 we get to Yukio, who is running part of an underground criminal network that settles its disputes with combat between champions, and who tries to rope Storm in to helping her out now that Wolverine is dead.  Storm, being Very Principled, is appalled that Yukio is involved in such things – to be fair, apparently more the combat side of things than the crime as such, which she must always have known about – but is drawn in to helping out once to protect Yukio herself.  This turns out to give Yukio the opening to do something Storm approves of even less.  In theory this one offers the strongest case for the other moral side.  Yukio makes a reasonably rational argument that by settling their disputes in this way, the criminals are only hurting one another, and doing no harm to civilians.  Moreover, it seems pretty clear that the arrangement was supported by Wolverine, giving it the endorsement of a major league hero (even if a morally debatable one at times).  But for all that, there’s never really any serious suggestion that the story sees a moral dispute here.  Storm instantly objects; the story plainly agrees with her; and while she does help out Yukio, she ends up being taken advantage of, the apparent moral being not to get drawn into such things.  So there may be an argument here for the characters, there’s really no debate as far as the story itself is concerned.

So this is my basic reservation about the book.  It’s driven by ideas rather than by plot, but while it sets up some potentially interesting scenarios, it’s always obvious where the story’s sympathies lie, and which side of the argument you’re meant to take.  And Storm is always on the right side of the argument from the outset (except when she’s making factual errors), which leaves her doing a lot of preaching to the other characters.  Which would be fine if this was an action driven series, or even a liberal power fantasy of the sort that Authority originally pretended to be.  But it isn’t – it’s a series built around exploring the scenarios that crop up in each story.  And when the main character regards the correct course of action as immediately self-evident (and the story plainly sides with her), it both undercuts the difficulty of the situation, and risks Storm coming across as preachy.

Still, there’s a healthy degree of ambition here, much as there is in Magneto, and there’s no doubt that it’s better for the book to engage with these ideas in a rather one sided way than not to do so at all.  For me, though, it’s a book with strong ideas that aren’t being dramatised quite as well as they could be.