STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #1
“Tea Ceremonies, Masquerades and Funerals”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Storm carrying two swords of lightning.

This is a five-issue miniseries, but it’s explicitly the final part of the story from the previous Storm ongoing, so I’m going to treat it as the last part of that.

STORM:

I don’t normally do plot synopses in these posts. But, like the previous volume, this issue jumps about in time quite a bit, and it isn’t especially easy to follow as a result. A lot of that, I think, is actually an art or colouring problem. There’s a basically straightforward narrative here, and the later scenes have flashbacks that fill in the earlier scenes. But the art doesn’t adequately signal a distinction between the main scene and the flashbacks – sometimes the flashbacks have different colour panel borders than the rest of the page, but it’s not especially noticeable and it isn’t even consistent from scene to scene.

So, with that in mind, here’s what actually happened. I’ll use the story page numbers for this purpose.

After being on the wrong side of the Thunder War in the previous volume, the Shinto thunder god Susanoo has decided to commit ritual suicide, and wants Storm to assist. Since he knows she won’t want to, he seizes control of Rage, the Rogue Planet and threatens to crash it into Earth unless she shows up to help. That all happens before the issue starts.

On pages 2-5, continuing into the flashbacks on pages 12, 22 and 25: Storm shows up on Rage and persuades Susanoo to join her in a tea ceremony. She uses the tea to drug him, and she and the other Avengers defeat him. Storm banishes him to a pocket dimension, as he rails about being denied an honourable death.

On pages 7-11, the B-plot: the Scarlet Witch investigates the deaths of a couple in Little Rock, who died when their electronic devices started glitching and their heads exploded.

On pages 12-21, continuing into the flashbacks on pages 22 and 24: Susanoo’s war general Akujin sends monsters to attack Biarritz. Local superhero Death Siren calls Storm for help. Storm and the Basque storm god Sugaar duly arrive to help, but Akujin’s illusions lead her to waste time saving the wrong part of town. Akujin declares that another city will be destroyed every five days until her master is released. Death Siren dies in the battle, and Storm tries to comfort her children.

On pages 22-24: Back at the Storm Sanctuary, Storm reflects on the day’s failures and lashes out in frustration.

On page 26: While Storm sleeps, the Scarlet Witch arrives at the Storm Sanctuary.

See, the actual story is pretty straightforward! There’s no mention of Eternity, so apparently he really is gone after the end of the last series.

Storm refuses to help Susanoo kill himself, citing her vow against taking a life. She seems to agree that she would be willing to kill him if it really were necessary in order to save Earth, but she’s stringing him along at that point. She’s probably more sincere in implying that she’s angry about him threatening innocent lives and refusing to make an effort to redeem himself.

Her solution to the Susanoo problem is to chuck him into a pocket dimension until he cools down – as she did with the thunder gods Sango and Chaac in Storm #9. Despite chucking him into prison, Storm seems to register Susanoo’s request for her help as a gesture of respect and feels guilty about betraying his trust. She regards her failure in Biarritz (brought about in part by that treatment of Susanoo) as a loss of honour.

She doesn’t take issue with Susanoo’s statement that “you are not a god in the same way that I am”, and says that she doesn’t believe that she’s immortal. An obvious question is in quite what respect she is a goddess. I suspect Ayodele’s answer would be that she’s on a par with actual storm gods when it comes to controlling the weather, making her not just powerful but powerful in an iconic and nature-linked way, and a modern iteration of the storm god archetype.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Gateway has a non-speaking appearance in one panel, bringing the Avengers to help subdue Susanoo.

Sugaar. The Basque storm serpent god accompanies Storm to Biarritz, apparently because he was summoned by his own worshippers there rather than because they’re generally hanging out. We saw Sugaar before in Storm #11 among the hostile storm gods, but he seems pretty reasonable here and approves of Storm’s approach to dealing with Susanoo.

As they arrive in Biarritz, Storm tells Sugaar to avoid calling any thunder “so as not to alert our enemies to our arrival”. Given that Sugaar is a 50 metre long serpent who has just emerged from the water in full view of the enemy forces, I can’t see the thunder making much difference.

VILLAINS:

Susanoo. His older sister Amaterasu wasn’t happy about him attempting to side with Hadad in the Thunder War, and (at her suggestion) he wants to commit ritual suicide in order to redeem himself. He really, really takes exception to being imprisoned instead – and says that Storm will “soon know the wrath of mistress Death”. Death isn’t directly involved in this story, but the previous run ended with a cliffhanger in which Death was rounding up undead heroes to avenge the death of Oblivion.

Susanoo claims that he sided with Hadad in the Thunder War because he wanted to destroy the universe and start afresh “without suffering and pain”. This seems to tie in with the reference in the B-plot to the rebooting of the universe, though it’s not clear how yet.

Akujin. She describes herself as Susanoo’s “war general”, and leads an assortment of monsters to destroy Biarritz as a demonstration of power, hoping that Storm will be persuaded to free her master rather than suffer further attacks. The narrator rather oddly describes her forces as Ẹbọra Òkúta, which seems to be Yoruba for something like “Stone Devils”, but the creatures immediately around her look more Japanese. If she is using creatures from a different pantheon, it’s not yet clear why. The Ẹbọra Òkúta are lava creatures and easily defeated with rain, so they may be intended to give Storm a seemingly easy win before Akujin breaks her spirit by revealing the illusion. (They can’t be purely illusory, though, because they kill Death Siren.)

This is Akujin’s first appearance in the main timeline, but an alt-future version of her appeared in Rogue Storm as a traitorous member of X-Force who was actually working for the demonic Eēgūn.

The thing in the devices in Little Rock. A random couple get their heads exploded by malfunctioning devices – a TV and a phone. The guy with the phone seems to be trapped inside it afterwards; the woman’s fate is less clear.

The phone just shows error messages before killing him, but the TV shows a man in a spacesuit on a red planet (with grass) explaining that the previous universe was destroyed and replaced with a new “eight” version ten years ago, with a fake history. In the Marvel Universe, this paranoid rambling is in fact true, because the universe was destroyed and replaced with the virtually-identical-unless-you’re-Miles-Morales eighth cosmos in Secret Wars, which did come out 10 years ago. (And applying the “literal sliding timeline” idea, presumably its creation remains in 2015, even though the events have been dragged forward in time.)

After the couple are both dead, the TV shows a host who appears to be addressing the readers at home, and introduces the guest starring Scarlet Witch as if she was a chat show guest.

OTHER CHARACTERS:

Rage, the Rogue Planet. Described as “the cousin of Ego, the Living Planet”, and otherwise simply a planet that Susanoo can control by using his sword. It’s not clear that it’s actually intelligent.

Death Siren. This is her only appearance. She’s the local superhero for Biarritz, which in population terms is a bit like being the local superhero for Bangor, Maine. She looks the part but she’s out of her league here and she knows it. Her kids idolise her and she’s clearly trying to put on a show for them. Sensibly enough, her plan is simply to call in an A-list hero and focus on saving civilians instead of getting in their way. She’s overawed by the thought of meeting a top tier hero like Storm, but gets killed before that can happen. She seems to have some sort of Songbird/Banshee type powers, and while she seems rather panicky for a superhero (in fairness, she’s defending her children), she doesn’t go down without a respectable fight.

The Avengers show up for one panel and don’t get any dialogue. Aside from Storm, the team are Captain Marvel, the Vision, the Black Panther, Iron Man and Captain America (Sam Wilson).

The Scarlet Witch shows up to investigate events in the B-plot, evidently because Storm has unleashed something on Earth.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES:

• Page 1 is a recap page showing incidents from the previous volume. Specifically, Storm defeated Hadad in Storm #12; she saved Rio de Janeiro in Storm #8; and she dealt with a radioactive explosion, and rescued an Orchis sympathiser and his son, in Storm #1. Only one of these incidents is relevant to the plot of the current issue, and they’re shown out of order.
• Susanoo’s “actions against [Storm] and the universe in the Thunder War” were in Storm #7 and #11.
• The “terrible cosmic war that destroyed the old universe” refers to the Secret Wars storyline of 2015.