Storm is caught between life and death in her homeland
Originally Published October 1985
We begin in the desert.
There, Storm wanders weak and weary, having survived an attempt on her life by Nazi She-Wolf Andrea von Stucker. As the wind whips around her, she laments the fact that once she would have shaped the elements, they now have her at their mercy.
When the duststorm ends, Storm briefly thinks she is responsible, and that this means she has her weather-controlling powers back, but as she leaps to soar into the air on the wind, she only falls.
After seeing a vision of Forge, she is bitten by a desert snake, whose venom may prove lethal. Utterly dejected, she crawls into a cave to die in peace. There, she sees more visions, of the X-Men, even Phoenix. She considers how it may be her time to give up and die, and Wolverine, who seems all too real with the scent of his cigarette smoke, offers to help.
Xavier even chides her for wishing she had stayed as a Goddess in the safety of her homeland instead of using her powers to help the Earth, grow as a person, and zap the Blob every few months. Ultimately she declines a quick death, and awakens sometime later, realizing she had not been bitten, and will not die.
Walking a little further, she happens upon a crashed bus - which had been the source of the "imagined" smoke from Wolverine's cigar. There she finds Shani, the only survivor of the wreck. Shani is pregnant and trying to return to her village. Storm walks her there, wrapping her in her meager cloak for protection from the elements.
En route, they pass by some rusted farm equipment, from which Storm discerns the desert was once arable land. Omce they arrive, they are greeted by Shani's parents and the tribe elder, Mjnari.
Storm collapses.
She awakens later, being tended by the elder. In the next hut, Shani is giving birth, but the process is not going well and she struggles, calling for Ororo. Outside the hut, the men of the village dance to invoke the gods. They have no vehicle to send her to a hospital.
With great effort, and support from Storm, the baby does come, but does not breathe. Storm works to resuscitate the boy...
And soon...
With the baby having come into the world, there is rejoicing in the village, but Mjnari remains somewhat stoic. He merely begins to walk, slowly, into the desert, as though performing some grim obligation.
As she catches up with the elder on the hilltop, Mjnari tells the tale of the village. Once, they were in tune with nature. It was a hard life, but they were satisfied. Sometime ago, however, men from outside came with their machines and brought promises of great abundance - to make the desert bloom.
It worked at first, but as the years passed it became harder and harder to farm the desert. More machines, more fertilizer, more outside supplies. War made it difficult to obtain the necessary fuel, and when a machine would break there would be nobody to fix it.
Soon, the abundance ended and the village - its ranks swelled during the times of plenty - had no food to feed its many mouths.
A new balance was struck with nature. Their number would be only as much as they could feed. So when a new baby is born to the village, an older member must give their place.
Mjnari pledges that some day, the balance will be restored properly - they will not grow proud and arrogant, but learn from their mistakes and treat the land with care.
Storm is shocked. She regrets coming, for if she had not brought Shani, Mjnari would not have to die. Mjnari scolds her, saying that thanks to her, a baby has been born.
With that thought, she feels she has at last found meaning again in her life since losing her powers. Though she remains with her feet on Earth, in her heart she soars.
Further Thoughts:
In publishing time, it has been about a year since the original "Lifedeath" story, which married Chris Claremont's words and Barry Windsor-Smith's art in a special issue to examine Storm through the lends of a time spent with Forge, the man who, unbeknownst to her at the time, was responsible for her losing her mutant powers in the issue prior. It was heavy on psychology, emotion, and character study in a way comics - certainly X-Men and mainstream superheroes, and maybe even most indie books - simply weren't, at least not in that flavour.
This follow-up story, which sees Storm sometime later on her pilgrimage to her homeland of Kenya, picks up many of the themes addressed by that issue but handles them with a distinct approach rather than rehashing that moment. Here we have a simple story, beautifully told. Even moreso than with a standard comic book, my mere summary does not do justice to the experience of reading this work.
Does this story work as a great fable? Perhaps and perhaps not. Has something like this happened, or is it merely the invention of the writer, presuming how he thinks an African Tribe might react to the benefits - and failures - of new technology? Does it offer true respect to African culture and Indigenous knowledge, or does it fetishize the tribal and "traditional" in a problematic fashion? Is it an endorsement of social Darwinism and population control, or a warning of things gone too awry, changing one ill for another, and a promise that true balance between the two is the key to a harmonious future? What does this story mean, at the dawn of "USA for Africa" type charities swooping in to "save" starving Africans in the 80's? I have a lot of questions about the content of the story itself, and no answers.
But in addressing the characters and situations the way it does, and inspiring these questions in me, this issue does more work than your average 22-page Marvel Comic on the racks in 1985. So much the better that it is told in the elegant and airy style of Windsor-Smith, whose contribution earns him a special credit alongside the series' regular author Claremont. The book looks and feels great, and opportunities arise throughout for the artist to flex his uniquely peerless pacing and compositional skills to the benefit of the story. (That said, his Storm almost looks like a distinct character from the one we are accustomed to, although he draws his Storm well.) Bringing in an artist of Windsor-Smith's caliber helps establish that this is a prestigious moment in the timeline of comics, and worth paying attention to closely. In the end, if the content itself doesn't wash - and I'm not sure that it doesn't, I only think it might not - it is worth paying close attention to this issue for the form it takes, and the sheer ability it carries to elevate a monthly comic whose routines we feel like know after all these years into something more literary and thoughtful.
In their normal existences, the X-Men characters rush from crisis to crisis, but are also given time away from the action to think in long thought bubbles about how they are feeling about recent events or their longtime baggage. What the Lifedeath stories do is give us a chance to watch the character breathe with herself, to inhabit the world and experience things along with us.
By this point, Chris Claremont has been the credited writer for more than 100 issues of X-Men, over the course of ten years. He has written or co-written numerous stories that stand amongst the best superhero stories ever told, grown this property from obscurity into a franchise, contributed or solidified a host of characters, situations and themes that would resonate across decades, and generally provided a consistently enjoyable book. At the end of 10 years it seems like we should know everything Chris Claremont was capable of doing and where things are going.
But the magic of comics is that they are collaborative, and one switch of partners can inspire the longtime writer of a property to see things in a new way, or a new way of depicting what he already sees. Every artist, based on the degree they do or do not input to the story they work on with Claremont, helps shape the direction of this series and has a chance to help make a mark on it. And yet it retains a steady hand, a certain soul that we recognize as the X-Men all this time, thanks to the one person who has been there through it all.
You guys, I love comics.
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