Whiteout...
Jul. 21st, 2004 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fajrdrakoI read a wonderful graphic novel: Whiteout by Greg Rucka. I see it was nominated for the Eisner Award in 1999 - did it win? It's drawn by Steve Leiber, whose work I don't remember seeing before.
It feels like a Euroean comic. Black and white, realistic, with the kind of murder mystery/thriller plot more normally found in prose novels, not comics.
It's a murder mystery set in Antarctica. I can't recall coming across such a thing before - in any medium. It did bring back memories of reading Ice Station Zebra at the cottage when I was fourteen, caught up in a frigid Arctic adventure on a sweltering Ontario day. As in that book, the cold is almost a character in itself - it's certainly a weapon. This was a good contrast to the recent Spider-Man story I read by Paul Jenkins, where at a wind chill of fifty below characters are throwing snowballs. At those temperatures, snow is like powder - you can't pack it. It rang false.
Nothing in Whiteout rang false.
The protagonist is a U.S. Marshal, Carrie Stetko, who surely faces obstacles that most U.S. Marshalls would never encounter. I liked the way Rucka writes about women as protagonists, with neither falseness nor condescension. Rucka was a bit of an unknown quantity as a writer for me , despite all that he has written - I'll certainly look for his work again.
If you want to have a look at the comic, you can see several interior pages here.
It feels like a Euroean comic. Black and white, realistic, with the kind of murder mystery/thriller plot more normally found in prose novels, not comics.
It's a murder mystery set in Antarctica. I can't recall coming across such a thing before - in any medium. It did bring back memories of reading Ice Station Zebra at the cottage when I was fourteen, caught up in a frigid Arctic adventure on a sweltering Ontario day. As in that book, the cold is almost a character in itself - it's certainly a weapon. This was a good contrast to the recent Spider-Man story I read by Paul Jenkins, where at a wind chill of fifty below characters are throwing snowballs. At those temperatures, snow is like powder - you can't pack it. It rang false.
Nothing in Whiteout rang false.
The protagonist is a U.S. Marshal, Carrie Stetko, who surely faces obstacles that most U.S. Marshalls would never encounter. I liked the way Rucka writes about women as protagonists, with neither falseness nor condescension. Rucka was a bit of an unknown quantity as a writer for me , despite all that he has written - I'll certainly look for his work again.
If you want to have a look at the comic, you can see several interior pages here.
