Written by Greg Pak
Drawn by Victor Ibanez
Colored by Ruth Redmond
Published by Marvel Comics

I picked this book up out of sheer curiosity. I haven’t read any of the X-books regularly since Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, so I’m going into this book pretty blind. To his credit, Greg Pak writes this story in a way that not much previous knowledge of recent events is required. Just the basics. Storm is still living at and working as a professor at Xavier’s school (which is now named after Jean Grey for some reason), teaching young mutants, while also using her powers for humanitarian efforts.

Oh yeah, and as you can see from the cover image, Storm’s rockin’ the mohawk again.

The main plot of this issue is that a Tsunami is striking a poor South American nation called San Marco, and Storm saves the day, although there is still major damage to the area. The people of the nation appreciate her, but the government is strongly anti-mutant and demands that she leave and never return. So Storm is forced to chose between doing what she believes is right, and not upsetting international politics. That’s always a good conflict for superhero stories, and it works well here. Particularly in the way Pak focuses on one young local girl who clearly idolizes Storm.

A subplot involves another young girl, a mutant who attends Xavier’s school, and isn’t fitting in. She doesn’t idolize Storm, or any of the X-Men, and thinks this school is just another way for the authorities to control mutants, and forces Storm to question her own conscious again. This eventually sends Storm back to San Marco, to defy the local government and help people. But is that just going to make things worse in the long run? We’ll see…

Story-wise, I thoroughly enjoyed this issue. Even though it ends with To Be Continued it feels pretty complete here, like a single-issue story, which is very rare these days. But I think that’s good for a first issue, so anyone who may be on the fence about trying this new series can check it out, without feeling like they’ll be obligated to buy a longer arc just to understand it. Pak’s dialog and the way he writes Storm’s thought-captions all sound natural. And Victor Ibanez is a capable artist. A good effort by this creative team. I’m not yet sold on whether I’ll stick with this book for the long run, but based on this issue I think I’ll at least check out #2 when it comes out.

Storm (2014-) #1