Storm #8 annotations
STORM vol 5 #8
“Sinister Schemes of the Stars and Stripes, part one”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artists: Lucas Werneck & Mario Santoro
Colour artist: Alex Guimarães
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
STORM
The issue opens with Storm, in some sort of armour, addressing some sort of … glowing red cloud thing. Judging from the dialogue (“ever since I was a child, you have spoken to me like a mother…”) and the mention that it’s been hurt by the storm gods, this is apparently a manifestation of nature, though not one resembling Gaea’s normal appearance in Marvel. This seems to be Storm somehow sorting out the weather crisis from Brazil from the previous issue.
According to the narrator, Storm is more bothered by having to deal with the FBI than the cosmic threats of Oblivion or the “Thunder War” – presumably because it’s on a scale that she’s more invested in.
The Storm Sanctuary turns out to have been built for her by Iron Man, Moon Girl and Shuri. It emits solar rays so that it doesn’t cast a shadow, which is nice. Storm sees this as evidence of how well she treats the masses, though “not building a giant floating castle over their heads” might have been even nicer. She claims to have “the certifications issued by SHIELD” for its environmental credentials, though quite why they’re doing emissions testing is beyond me. Maybe they have some sort of role for highly sensitive superhero-type stuff.
When the FBI agents suggests that Storm was under Professor X’s control during “X-Manhunt” – seemingly offering her an out for helping him escape the authorities – she rejects the idea and claims that she is immune to telepathic control. This is clearly an exaggeration. She points to Gambit and Jubilee as examples of “latent energy” making people “immune to telepathy”, and there were indeed early stories for both of them in which they seemed to be resistant to telepathic scans – although obviously, there have also been many, many stories over the years in which telepaths have dealt with them normally. Storm suggests that she’s similar. Most stories have suggested that Storm is resistent to psychic control through strength of will and training, there is actually some precedent for this claim – for example, Jean Grey claims in X-Treme X-Men #9 that she can only do a surface probe of Storm’s mind because of “the electrical forces you control”.
SUPPORTING CAST
Maggott. He’s testing his newly upgraded powers by having some sort of fighting tournament in the Storm Sanctuary. While we didn’t see them last issue, his two maggotts do appear separately from him here, posing on his shoulder. Gateway interprets this as a “way of facing his fears and preparing for the battle to come”, but Manifold worries that Maggott is just going to get himself killed trying to take on the sort of opponents he’s selected.
Manifold. This is the first time we’ve seen him post-Krakoa. He crops up to teleport Storm to Washington for her meeting with the FBI, but seems to be generally hanging out at the Sanctuary. He seems sceptical of her decision to co-operate with the US authorities. Rather bizarrely, he claims that if she says the word then “we’ll kindle a second Krakoan age” – if the mutants had the ability to do that, they’d surely be doing it anyway. (He alludes to the first Krakoan age having been “announced by a whisper into the mind of humanity”, referring to Professor X’s telepathic announcement to the world in House of X #1.)
Gateway. He also seems to just be hanging around at the Storm Sanctuary now – though the last time we saw him was in Astonishing X-Men Infinity Comic #18 when he was helping out Sean Cassidy.
GUEST CAST
Thor. He showed up at the end of the last issue to warn Storm not to go after the other storm gods. His actual role is to inform Storm that a war has broken out between two camps of thunder gods, depending on whether they support or oppose Hadad (see below). Thor is evidently opposed to Hadad but doesn’t know which side the gods from last issue were on. Since he expressly offers to ally with Storm against the storm gods if they show up again, it’s not obvious why he told her last issue not to go after them, but presumably the idea is that solving the weather problems was a higher priority.
The Silver Surfer. Thor’s mention that Hadad will return in the future is accompanied by a single panel flash forward of the Surfer defending Galactus from one of Hadad’s “rot storms”. This picks up from the opening scene in the previous issue. In that scene, the Surfer absorbed the power of Surtur’s sword, which is why he’s trailing a cloud of soot in this panel.
The Black Panther, Iron Man and Mr Fantastic all have cameos, acknowledging that Storm has solved the weather problem that we saw them working on last issue.
The other seven participants in Maggott’s tournament – all of whom get just a single panel – are as follows:
- Gentle, making his first post-Krakoa appearance.
- The She-Hulk.
- The Juggernaut, from X-Men.
- Big Bertha, from the Great Lakes Avengers. Her last significant appearance was in a GLA story in Avengers Unlimited Infinity Comic #26 in 2022. She’s a mutant, but very much outside the orbit of the X-books.
- Strong Guy, last seen hanging around with Dazzler in her mini.
- Armor, also making her first post-Krakoa appearance. A rather odd choice if Maggott is going for powerhouses, though her power set would present him a problem in pracice.
- The Abomination, of all people – normally a villain, and a villain when he was last seen in Thunderbolts #1 (2022), so an odd person to invite, except in the sense that he’s a powerhouse.
The One Above All shows up in the Hadad flashback. First appearing in Fantastic Four #511, viewed from within the Marvel Universe, the One Above All is basically an omnipotent God and the ultimate creator of the universe. Some stories (including FF #511) give the One Above All a very meta angle in which he’s effectively the collective personification of the literal creators of the Marvel Universe; in that issue, he appears as Jack Kirby. This story, however, seems to be using him simply as the Marvel Universe’s top cosmic entity.
VILLAINS
Hadad. According to Thor, Hadad was the very first storm god, dating back a billion years. Thor claims that “the Phoenix Force was his armour and Infinity was his shield”, but by the nature of gods in the Marvel Universe, we shouldn’t necessarily take this stuff literally – after all, the various gods also maintain their mutually-exclusive stories about how they created the world.
Hadad seems to have caused devastation among the cosmic beings in the Dimension of Manifestations until the One Above All stepped in. The Dimension of Manifestations is a location introduced in Quasar #37 (1992), where abstract cosmic entities manifest. It’s run by a guy called Anthropomorpho, believe it or not.
In the real world, Hadad was the storm god of the Canaanite and ancient Mesopotamian religions.
The 2007 handbook Thor & Hercules: Encyclopaedia Mythologica identified Hadad with Ba’al, who has appeared before in the Marvel Universe – he fought Wolverine in Wolverine vol 2 #12-16 and appeared in several issues of Blaze. In the real world, “Ba’al” was an alternative name for Hadad, but it was also used for other characters too. It’s fairly unlikely that Ayodele intends his cosmic primordial storm god to be the same character who was previously beaten by Wolverine (though in fairness, that story did involve an implication that Logan had some sort of magical significance), so we should probably take it that the other Ba’al is not, in fact, the same Hadad.
FBI Special Agent Fabiyi. The narrator starts off quite sympathetic to the FBI, claiming that “The government only beckons when a grave error has been made and the day for reckoning was due.” We also see that the FBI apparently employs quite a few aliens and superhumans to deal with superhuman type affairs. One of them is Special Agent Fabiyi, an alien from a planet with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere. He doesn’t seem to be a pre-established species. He has some sort of contact telepathy, which Storm sees through at once (though she’s clearly not immune to it, as she claims, because she does experience the hallucation that he tries to create).
Fabiyi is clearly hostile – he’s setting out to annoy her, and asks bizarre questions about whether she ever faced prosecution for her time as a child thief in Cairo. As she points out, this would be a matter for the Egyptian legal system. (Also, a quick online search suggests that she would have been under the Egyptian age of criminal responsiblity at the time, and that the time limit for prosecuting her would long since have expired anyway.) While his point seems to be more about her thinking that she’s above the law, it’s not a very convincing example.
Ultimately, he’s there to arrest her for helping Professor X to escape the authorities during “X-Manhunt”. For some reason, despite his hostility, he starts off by offering her an out and suggesting that she was acting under Professor X’s control. Since Professor X is no longer on Earth, this can’t be intended as a pretext to punish him, so it’s not obvious why he makes the suggestion. Most likely, he’s hoping that she takes the bait and that the claim can then be disproven in order to make matters worse for her.
Special Agent Fabiyi indicates that the events of issues #4-7 all took place witin “the last six weeks”.
Ever increasingly, this series tells me that I am not meant to enjoy it or even to tell the basics of the plot.
It truly feels like there was a very important prelude issue that explains the rather unusual context and premises this series operates under, and I was judged unworthy of having access to it.
Maybe this whole series is meant to be the exposition of dream journeys or something similar?
In reality, Ba’al is a title meaning “lord” in Semitic language. Ba’al Hadad could basically be translated as “Lord Thunder”.
The Marvel Universe Ba’al (or Baal) flight by Wolverine would seem to be the independent character based on a Christian demon first mentioned in the occult text the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.
Luis: you’re not the only one. I keep wondering if I missed something along the way, or even accidentally skipped an issue.
I find it absolutely bizarre that the United States FBI is apparently employing the same sort of alien agents we’d normally expect from SWORD or other such groups. This just brings up so many questions about how, why, logistics, what do the aliens get out of this, and more. (I can see the government employing such Earth-native superhumans as might find appropriate, but actual aliens? For the FBI?)
Sometimes there are comics that are confusing in a way that you basically know what the writer is going for but they just wrote it I the most confusing way possible. Like the Jason Latour Wolverine & The X-Men. But with this one… I’m just at a loss.
The current version of SHIELD, which debuted in Ryan North’s Fantastic Four v.7 #7, is apparently specifically tasked with regulating super-people.
Earlier, the Jason Aaron run of Thor: God of Thunder introduced an environmentalist SHIELD agent named Roz Solomon, whose job was essentially to go after the Marvel Universe equivalent of villains from Captain Planet.
Agent Lundqvist also appears in this issue. Bizarrely, Fabiyi says Storm should be able to sense him behind a two-way mirror with her powers. Ah, yes, Storm’s famous two-way mirror sense.
“While his point seems to be more about her thinking that she’s above the law, it’s not a very convincing example.”
Ayodele has said in interviews that he views Storm’s past as a thief as something she has to atone for. This is just bizarre since she was a child at the time. One could make a case that Storm doesn’t think she has to pay for her bad choices. She nearly drowned Maddie stopping Mastermind and never considered resigning as team leader. She seriously considered killing Havok and never considered resigning as team leader. She stabbed Forge thinking he was trying to help the Adversary and it turned out he was trying to stop the Adversary and she never considered resigning as the team leader. But instead of choosing an example from when she was an adult, Ayodele chose an example from when Storm was TWELVE.
The X-Men as a whole are definitely guilty of harboring mutants who have committed violent crimes- Rogue, Magneto and Marrow come to mind. One could make a case this is unfair to their victims. But Ayodele chooses an incident where Xavier was innocent and had been mistreated while in prison.
Even worse. this comes at the same time when the Avengers allied with Maddie, Mordo, Dr. Octopus, Mysterio, MODOK and Arcade against Doom in One World Under Doom. Maddie apparently has diplomatic immunity as the queen of Limbo, and Mordo was last imprisoned in Strange’s Sanctum, so it’s possible Strange imprisoned him there because there are no open warrants out on him. But Dr. Octopus, Mysteerio, MODOK and Arcade should all be wanted criminals. It seems inconsistent that Storm is arrested for helping Xavier but the Avengers as a whole aren’t arrested for harboring the villains.
The problem with the way Storm described her powers making her immune to telepathic control is that she makes it sound like she found out Gambit’s and Jubilee’s powers make them immune to telepathy and then learned to use her powers to do the same thing. But Storm’s been resisting telepathy long before Uncanny X-Men 266, where she met Gambit.
This series just keeps getting more bizarre. I guess adding telepathic immunity to Storm’s powers is just in line with Ayodele’s interpretation of the character as being all-powerful as well as always right.
But I did enjoy the panel of Reed Richards looking a little smug about never getting divorced. Can anyone do a fact-check on that? After all the awful stuff he’s done, have they never done an arc where he and Sue break up for a bit?
@Michael I think it’s supposed to be that Storm should be able to sense him because she can sense his nervous system
John-Reed and Sue were separated for a time in the 1970s, after Reed decided that his trans clone, no, son was an abomination and decided to bankroll Trump’s….wait, I mean, he decided his mutant son was too powerful and used an untested invention to remove Franklin’s powers. Sue walked out on him. Reed became an incel, or something. Then, Namur came up with an ingenious plan to pretend (wink, wink) to have an affair with Sue, which in some roundabout way (which threatened massive death and mayhem) led the two love birds back into each other’s arms. Also, Sue convinced Reed to buy Twitter to espouse Nazi rhetoric in order to impress her. Imperious Rex!
They were never divorced.
@Chris V, John- In Reed’s defense, Annihllus was trying to use Franklin’s powers to kill off most of the planet’s population. So Reed put Franklin in a coma.
Namor and the Inhumans then decide that the best way to get Reed and Sue back together is for Namor to invite Sue to join him and then stage an invasion of New York City. Amazingly. the plan works.
As for Franklin, he remained in a coma until the FF took him to Crystal’s and Quicksilver’s wedding, where Ultron attacked, and due to a contrived interaction between Franklin’s powers and the device Ultron was using to destroy the heroes, Franklin awoke and Ultron was destroyed.
“an alien from a planet with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere”
So just like the earth then.
This comic primarily exists to (aside from earning revenue for its corporate owners) satisfy 1) Ororo Munroe’s fanatics , as well as 2) all those other fans who are desiring and demanding a solo title starring a WOC who is of AA heritage , which apparently there are enough of them for Disney-Marvel to consider the series adequately profitable to continue publishing . Also , you should never believe 100% what a Marvel Comics character says at face value, they’re all intentionally designed to be “fallible and flawed” characters w/ problems (as Stan Lee once put it) , thus they are necessarily unreliable narrators who are much more often than not either just too full of themselves or lacking in self-confidence/esteem or unknowingly unaware of their own ignorance or willfully delusional or outright lying.
Divorce is quiet rare in comics.
Tchalla had his marriage to Storm Annulled, Benefits of being king.
Tony and Emma was only a paper marriage so not long term enough to worry about
Peter and MJ ended their marriage via reality warp
Scott has ended 2 marriages by declaring his Spouse dead (both are now alive)
The Hudson’s also had a legal death.
Wanda and the Vision end through disassembly
The only long term divorce that have really mattered are Hank and Jan, and Crystal and Quicksilver.
I don’t see a real difference between an annulment and a divorce, except for the amount of paperwork.
Both of them ends with both spouses still alive and not married to each other.
@Jdsm24: completely agree we can’t take characters at face value. But this book seems to hero worship Storm so much. How can she be much better or powerful or infallible? It’s boring to read. Bring back Ewing’s approach: Storm is all powerful but can’t see where she is failing her people as she’s so overstretched/high handed.
I also don’t know how Storm (or Jean) ever comes back down from their cosmic status at this point. Which is a shame, as they are fantastic characters when we allow them to be (as Jdsm24 notes) that little bit flawed!
Are we sure we can trust SHIELD to certify anything about floating cities? Don’t theirs fall from the sky pretty regularly?
I just can’t get into this series at all.
Also at the moment SHIELD is basically CIA’s superhuman division? It’s just… weird. This whole book is so weird. There are Marvel books where I wouldn’t bat an eye when presented with a government people full of aliens and people with jetpacks, but somehow – even though I don’t know what this series is or what it’s trying to do – here it really didn’t fit.
And also, we’re doing ‘hero vs US government’ in 2025 and the government is represented by literal aliens?
I am constantly bamboozled by this book.
As for Reed and Sue, they were on the rocks after the Civil War as well – they ended up on opposing sides of the conflict and afterwards took a leave on absence to work on their marriage. That’s when Storm and T’Challa briefly joined the FF to take their place.
…and that was supposed to be ‘government building full of aliens and people’, not ‘government people full of aliens and people’. One day I’ll learn to proofread these.
I’m not sure why people seem to have a problem with this comic existing.
Why does it exist? To make money for a corporation. This is the sole reason any Marvel or DC comics exist.
Because there are enough fans who want to read it. Well, yes, that is the same as the #1 reason. It applies just as readily to Uncanny X-Men or X-Men. There are enough fans who want to read those comics to make them profitable enough that Marvel continues to publish them. Quality is never a concern, and it is a subjective valuation anyway. Personally, I can’t read any of these new X-titles.
Also, Ayodele seems to be a fan of Ororo and wants to write this series about her. Which, is probably more than one can say about a number of “Big Two” comics, in which the motivation to write the characters is probably, “It’s my job and I can make a lot of money writing this book.” Where the line is drawn isn’t always transparent, of course.
The primary purpose of Marvel launching nearly twenty X-titles as part of “From the Ashes” was to flood the market.
The fact that a character is Black or a woman or African or anything else shouldn’t make the comic somehow different.
In March, Storm sold nearly as many copies as X-Men. In April, Storm outsold Avengers.
It’s stayed in the top 50 for eight months. The other glut of X-books shoved out have failed to maintain this level, except the three one would expect (Magik and Psylocke haven’t reached issue 8 yet). Plus, Storm has also continued to outsell Psylocke (one of the few other books still in the top 50).
The only X-titles outselling Storm are Uncanny, X-Men, Wolverine (the big three), and Magik.
The books I have a question about their existence are Phoenix, which was often selling less than the X-books which were cancelled, and Hellverine being made an ongoing series when it’s near the bottom of the barrel with sales each month.
It seems to me Ayodele is writing Storm as Marvel’s Superman. The conflict comes from the discrepancy between being all-powerful and all-good. She won’t compromise and let mutants get some good publicity if it means having to lie. She’ll die before she lets Doom kill his chef. She can get possessed by a cosmic entity and her will is still too strong for it to make her kill. She’s perfect, beloved, and even has a Fortress of Solitude.
You can argue whether that’s a viable approach, but man, the pacing is bizarre and the characters are opaque. She’s terminally ill until Dr. Voodoo magicks it away. A storm is tearing apart Brazil in one issue and in the next she solves it in the first page. I can’t tell you what Storm thinks about this whole cosmic possession storyline. I can’t even tell you whether she’s aware of it.
@Evilgus: I wouldn’t be so quick to call for a return to Ewing’s approach – all he ever did was pay lip service to the idea that Ororo was spreading herself too thin, in practical terms she still managed to one-shot Tarn and Vulcan, lead the rebellion for a hundred years in SoS, win the Genesis War practically single-handed, and destroy Nimrod with lightning, his one weakness, all while displaying zero character development or any of the humanizing traits she used to have.
Al Ewing wrote Storm as The Great Non-White Foreign Protagonist, up to ten, all the time. It would make great satire if he made some very small adjustments. Give her a cape and shave her hair and there would be concerns about the response from manga artist ONE. Which is a pity, because the end result would have been much more entertaining and honest.
Ayodele writes her instead as some bizarre sort of (accidental?) combined plot device protagonist / trickster god that is even more prone to humorous satire than Ewing’s take. It frankly reminds me of “I Am Weasel” more than anything else. It is just so enthusiastically and continuously over-the-top while somehow missing every necessary punchline that it may well end up inventing a new genre out of sheer persistence.
If he ever decides to actually explain the plot, that is. Or maybe the point is to end every issue in a cliffhanger and then daringly ignore it completely in the following issue without any clarification or mention, for reasons that clearly are outside the scope of my limited powers of plot understanding.
Maybe this is Deadpool in disguise and we will eventually have a #-1 issue that reveals the twist?
Or maybe this series’ issues are published in a random order that may or may not eventually coalesce in a coherent story once someone notices the gimmick and realizes the proper sequence (assuming the series lasts long enough)?
Or maybe Ayodele is just trolling Marvel and Storm’s fans – perhaps in anticipation for seeking a new job as a MAD Magazine feature writer?
Your guess is as good as mine.
In Marvel lore (according to Encyclopedia Mythologica), Ba’al Hadad the Mesopotamian storm god & Ba’al the Christian demon first mentioned in the occult text the Pseudomonarchia Daemonumn are the same character (the god was transformed into a demon by Marduk Kurios around the time monotheism began to supplant polytheism in the Middle East).
But it was implied that the Ba’al defeated by Wolverine wasn’t at full power yet because he recently reincorporated in a mortal host body. And it was revealed that this Ba’al had a fear of the “Hand of God” (the being that killed him eons ago), so that could be why they are linking his story to TOAA (another of the Marvel Universe’s Judeo-Christian god representations) here.
@Luis, someday, when its safe for Marvel to do so (lest they get cancelled by enraged SJWs) somebody will retcon that some powerful-enough reality warper fan of 616-Storm (mayne the Black teen girl from The Worst XMan Ever mini-series) was secretly manipulating events behind the scenes of this volume of her solo series which is why she became such a Mary Sue
@Rory , No-Prize : Hadad’s rampage in the Dimension of Manifestations is only in the Earth-616 subsection , since there is no way I can suspend my disbelief that a single individual stormgod from a single individual planet can actually defeat all of Marvel-616’s various universal-scale cosmic beings all by himself. Not even 616-Thor at his most powerful was that powerful.
@Diana: that’s true! Ewing did still write Storm as basically infallible. It’s like she’s not permitted to have humanising moments now.
I’m glad she’s getting something of a push but it’s not the direction I want. For any x-character really, I like seeing them in the team, interacting with each other.