Storm And The Brotherhood Of Mutants #2
The Brotherhood teams up with Destiny to take on Orbis Stellaris in Storm & the Brotherhood of Mutants #2, by writer Al Ewing, artist Andrea Di Vito, colorists Jim Charalampidis and Rachelle Rosenberg, and letterer Ariana Maher. This book closes out Year 100 with a bang, both literally and figuratively.
Destiny goes to visit the Brotherhood on Arakko Base with a request. She asks Storm to help her destroy Orbis Stellaris and his new weapon, the Death Sphere. Storm agrees, and the Brotherhood sets out. Using Destiny’s visions, the Brotherhood gets aboard the Death Sphere, and Khora kills Destiny at Storm’s order. Then, the leader of the Brotherhood uses magic to destroy the singularity at the center of the Sphere, destroying Stellaris and his forces at the cost of her own life.
SatBoM #2 is another great read, but it suffers from the problem that the entire Year 100 segment of SoS has. It introduces so many little cool things that happened in the last 90 years, from Noh-Varr joining the Brotherhood to the death of Mystique and her Freedom Force, that would have been awesome to see at full length. However, this is Ewing, so the book is very well done.
The opening page starts out with a Star Wars-esque text crawl, which sets the stage for the resulting story. Ewing is definitely doing a bit of a pastiche of the story from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away. The Death Sphere is a stand-in for the Death Star, and there’s a cool fighter assault. However, it’s only a bit of a pastiche since there’s more going on here than a wannabe Star Wars story. Storm is the highlight, an elderly goddess outmaneuvering even Destiny. It’s Ewing doing an awesome sci-fi story, and it closes out Year 100 rather well.
Di Vito, Charalampidis, and Rosenberg do a great job with the art. Space combat stories don’t always work very well in comics, but the team does an excellent job with it. Di Vito has long been one of the finest superhero artists out there, and this issue is yet another example of that. His figure work is wonderful, the detail never flags, and the art of the book looks amazing.
Storm & the Brotherhood of Mutants #2 is a fun comic, and the team does a fantastic job, but there’s a fundamental problem with this story that it can’t fix. None of this is going to matter, but at least it’s a fun read.
