Reading Diary #27: Catching up to the Storm Goddess

[shroomystar]

For this, I have read both Storm (2024) and Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant, both by Murewa Ayodele.

Slowly but surely, I am making my way through all the From The Ashes stuff that I missed from the time I wasn’t reading comics. I’ve been meaning to read Storm’s endeavors for agessss, so I am so very glad to have done so!

Storm is glorious. The art is gorgeous—of course, Lucas Werneck is a genius, but the other artists are great, too—and the cast and mythos this book weaves around Ororo is so very fun and so very incredible. I was so glad to see characters such as Frenzy, Maggot, and Doctor Voodoo—I love Doctor Voodoo!—with mentions of many other especially Black heroes such as Shuri, Luna Lafayette and Riri Williams… It makes the world feel so lived in, and makes Ororo’s connections to these characters feel so very real. This ran at the same time as Mackay’s Avengers, where Ororo was a part of the team (I read some of that back when it released, but I wanna delve into that again, too, since the cast is awesome), so those are weaved into the supporting cast rather seamlessly, too, though mostly with Tony; but it exists in the background and connects this run to the larger world so nicely.

I really like how much space Ororo gets in this run, and how much emphasis on her as an individual—and Avenger, an X-Men, sure; but mostly, Storm—is put… Her solo adventures, even as she has a small “team” and the Storm Sanctuary, have her alone in the center. Still, it does not forget her bonds and her friends—her love for all life is one of her biggest strengths, after all—and when she’s de-powered by Doctor Voodoo to save her life from radiation poisoning through a magical pact, she spends most of her week of being de-powered with the Louisiana X-Men, where characters she’s closest to reside: Gambit, Rogue, Nightcrawler and Wolverine. Jubilee is there, too, though! This display of closeness to her family, despite the focus on herself as a person, was so lovely to see… And also gave us some of comics’ most gorgeous pages, in my opinion; the training montage vs Wolverine that culminates in them collapsing into each other after a shared glance when Ororo knocks him down. The emotion displayed on their faces, here! The colors, the paneling, the sparring out in the rain! It is so unbelievably gorgeous that I am still lightheaded thinking about it. She leaves in the morning for a team is not her place at the moment and she has other things to do (and in matters of the heart, Ororo of the Storm, Ororo the Goddess, is just a woman, too), and it’s awesome.

While I enjoy more grounded perspectives on Ororo as a character, since many stories lose themselves in the Goddess and forget her as a person, or don’t want to deal with her as a person, this run never falls into this pitfall despite being so vast in scale. Its mythology is so well done… The Thunder War was such a joy to read. There are so many threads that are woven so incredibly well, from the Storm Sanctuary to the involvement of the FBI to the very first issue where Ororo saves a mutant child begging her to kill her because her awakening of her powers had nuclear fallout. I expected this comic to be good, and for me to have a good time, but I was still blown away.

Eternal Storm brings up a lot of Ororo’s old topics—of what being a person and a Goddess means; of possession and loss of agency; of love of life and seeing where one has to draw a line, and if one has to draw a line—without dredging up old stuff with no new perspective, and without running in circles (which comics are very good at), either. The costume is gorgeous, too (lol). The conclusion of the book was incredibly well done, as well. All around, I enjoyed it so very much.

Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant I was much more skeptical about, since I’ve seen people’s criticism on Twitter, especially regarding the motherhood arc. I am very sick of motherhood arcs for female superheroes; in most cases, they make it hard for her as a character to exist, or drag her down, or a huge chunk of her subsequent history becomes about tragedy surrounding motherhood. I’m sick of it! We’ve had this over and over with so many heroines! It rarely ever goes well! Sometimes a woman doesn’t have children! It feels like whenever a writer doesn’t know what to do with a female comic character, they create motherhood angst, lol.

This run, however, mostly avoids this. Furaha doesn’t show up much, and things aren’t really very focused on Ororo’s motherhood much at all, but on her, as a character. There is more focus put on Ororo and her mother. This, however, may be because the book only has five issues. This is also, still, however, where things fall apart.

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. The mythology continues, the stakes are high, and there’s no real motherhood angst to speak of. Wanda shows up, too, and her warning of Ororo and involvement in the plot seem to shape up to something great. Doctor Voodoo, apparently possessed by the spirit he asked to save Ororo’s life in the first run—the same spirit Eternity killed in Ororo’s body when she used her powers again too early—gathers undead forces to once again wage war on Storm, her universe, and apparently the whole multiverse!

And then things just. End. The end tells us Storm always wins, so we can think of how the rest went, but we… well, we have to think about it. We don’t get to find out how Doctor Voodoo got into this dilemma, or how Wanda will react to what Eternity has unleashed using Ororo’s hand, or any of the other threads that have been build up. And build-up it is; the build-up in these five issues is great, but then the pay-off and the actual stuff that’s been building up never happens, and we are left to imagine it in our head. It’s a baffling decision to me. Maybe this works for some people, but it doesn’t really work for me; Maybe Rogue Storm by Ayodele gives more context, but that’s a potential future and another Earth-something something because of it, so I’m not much inclined to pick it up, personally. Maybe this will be explained more in the upcoming team book Maximum X-Men, where Ororo will prominently feature. I’m excited for that one; It also features Betsy (though I hope this doesn’t mean she and Rachel broke up since Rachel isn’t on the team… I’m not sure why I’m so attached to this ship given there’s been barely any compelling writing for them so far, but they’re the only recent “this character has been bi/gay the entire time but it’s only now revealed” pairing where they’re not paired off with a random new character that won’t get any interiority ever, so I keep hoping despite hope that they’ll get to do some compelling and fun stuff and have a compelling and interesting dynamic with conflict and all, sigh!!!) and Wolverine on the team, some of Ororo’s closest and also most, well, murder-y of friends. So I’m excited where Ororo will go there after this abrupt end! Still, despite it all, I enjoyed these two runs.