Customer Reviews

Slow Storm

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Slow Storm by Danica Novgorodoff is perhaps one of the most ambitious graphic novels I've read in a while. The story is a simple one of a firefighter who saves the life of an illegal immigrant. However, what happens in one night and through small gestures is profound. The language is sometimes brutal then surprisingly shifts into poetic beauty in the time it takes to move from one panel to the next. The characters, their circumstances, though seemingly insignificant, sink beneath the skin until the reader can't help but have some compassion. And the story lingers in the sort of haunting way that one hopes a story will do long after the book has been left behind.

The images, with the soft watercolor washes of pastels, are evocative, especially the landscapes. Novgorodoff's confidence in her graphic abilities is evident as whole pages of panels go by without any text. And remarkably, this simple story that only lasts a few hours, not including some flashback details leading up to the encounter and one night, is dense with emotional significance, delineated wonderfully in the drawings.

Most remarkable of all, however, is that Novgorodoff has created a graphic novel that is completely interdependent. Without the words, though few and far between at times, the visuals would have less meaning. Likewise, the words, without the images, would simply read like an incomplete poem. By marrying the two together--graphic and novel--Novgorodoff has proven herself a mistress of this form and hopefully she will continue to add her voice and vision to more such efforts.

Me: I review graphic novels for VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) and Library Journal. I enjoy reading most types of graphic novels (manga and old-school superheroes aren't my favorite) & I purchase them (or help to) for our library system. That said I would be the first to say that I claim no expertise.

This review: I liked this and as the review title indicates, I think it shows great potential. The artwork is watercolor wash, the painting is beautiful & moody, and the panels are cinematically arranged.

The writing is where this gets a little iffy. Ursa Crain (U.Crain on the back of her uniform-odd) is a firefighter in rural Kentucky. She seems to have a rocky relationship with her brother Grim who is also a firefighter. (We don't know why beyond the fact that he is jealous of her two years at college). Rafi is an illegal alien working at a horse farm. On the day after the Kentucky Derby, the barn catches fire during a thunder storm. Rafi is knocked unconscious and flashes back over his trip across the boarder. Ursa and her brother are fighting the fire and she locks him in a room...and that act of attempted murder (Grim escapes) is blamed on the missing Rafi. On watch for recurring fire, Ursa finds Rafi alive and tries to help him...it's all more than a little muddy, complicated by appearances of Saint Cristobal and Coyotes (Mexican criminals who get people over the boarder for large sums of money) with actual coyote heads and characters obviously controlled by an author--

THAT said, I still feel it deserves three stars and I hope the author continues to work (she will, she works for the publisher--and I love First Second's line of graphic novels and their willingness to try new artists/authors).

I didn't know what to think after reading Slow Storm. I think it has some good qualities, but overall it feels heavy on characterization and light on story. If it were written as a non-graphic novel, it would be a short story -- or in my mind, a vignette. The overall description of the book pretty much sums up the entire story. No surprises -- nothing that gave me an epiphany or an "ah-ha" moment.

This book is more or less a mood piece. The art is dark and watercolor -- giving us a feeling of out of phase and dark. The dialogue doesn't quite fit the characters, especially at the beginning. The start to the story is slow and it really didn't hook until the fire in the barn. Even then, I felt something got sacrificed for the mood.

If literary is your bag, then perhaps you may find this story compelling. I found it had some interesting points, but overall, I think it lacked the hook necessary to keep me interested.

This Graphic novel has done what most can not try. A romance and a love story in a graphic novel format.

What anazes me is the angles that the artist takes in telling this story. It works and makes this graphic novel like a film.

The story is about an illegal Immigrate in Kentucky on a horse farm, getting ready for a nasty storm. Everyone I know loves Nicholas Sparks ( the Author of such books like Nights in Rodantheand The Lucky One), this graphic novel is in the same vein


The quick animated cuts of the panels are so good, it would be a great animated film if you were to make a live action film or cartoon from this. The story is tight and says much without as much dialog I am used to in a graphic novel. However it allows the images talk to the readership..and that is what makes this interesting

So weather the Storm and buy this graphic presentation

Bennet Pomerantz AUDIOWORLD

I am a fan of graphic novels, especially those by Marjane Satrapi[ Persepolis], Art Spiegelman [Maus], and also Neil Gaiman [the Sandman series], and chose to review Slow Storm for its unique story synopsis. Unfortunately, this graphic novel misses its mark with its weak, undeveloped plot, though it is rather heavy on character development.

The story centers around a firefighter Ursa somewhere in the Kentucky heartland who seems unsure of her place in the world. A call to duty finds her crossing paths with an illegal immigrant Rafi, a young man also disillusioned by the lack of chances to realise his own dreams, trying to escape poverty in Mexico by crossing illegally for a so-called better life in the US, but not finding what he seeks. I liked the part where these two 'lost' souls cross paths and find a sort of connection however tenuous that connection may be, but that connection lasts for only a brief moment - too much is spent on earlier events that really do not add much to the story. I felt the story of Ursa and Rafi meeting and how this meeting impacts their lives, and most importantly their perception of themselves should have been developed at greater length. The ending is open-ended which I felt was ok, but the feeling I got at the novel's conclusion was one of dissatisfaction with how the story was developed, not so much how it ended.

On the plus side, I have to say I liked the watercolor and ink illustrations - they lend a bleakness to the story that is apt considering how the two lead characters feel - dissatisfied, disillusioned and bitter. Final verdict - liked the artwork, didn't much care for the plot.

I really tried to get into "Slow Storm" but found that I just couldn't really get into it. The story rapidly develops during storm season out in the heartland and intertwines two characters. On one hand, you've got your migrant farm worker and on the other hand, you've got a fire woman. Both characters are battling personal demons and their paths cross a few times. I would say that this was an entertaining read but lost me a few times in the story telling. At a point or two, the characters were having visions which took a second or two for me to follow. Heck, maybe I'm just slow but I just had a hard time following. The characters were interesting but not that interesting to me unfortunately. So, unless you're into two characters crossing paths and departing, this might not be for you.

The art in this graphic novel is gorgeous, but the story is spare, oblique and bleak. Ursa is a practical, large young woman, unsure of her femininity and uncomfortable in her own skin. As a firefighter, she runs into the places any sane person runs out of. Rafi is an illegal from south of the border, a dreamer, given to visions and prone to running away. he is terrified and cowardly, except when it comes to his beloved horses. They come together on one stormy night. It's a sweet story but barely enough to fill a page. She gifts him with some strength and he gifts her with some imagination and that's about it. The reversal of sex roles is interesting, and as I said before the art is gorgeous. It's an aria, not a entire opera. It's about emotion more than action.

Danica Novgorodoff had already established her comics pedigree before her first full-length work was published. In 2006, she won the Isotope Award for her creative efforts in mini-comics, and the following year she was nominated for an Eisner. Expectations were thus high for her debut graphic novel, Slow Storm, which was released at the beginning of September of this year.

To a small degree, Novgorodoff lived up to these expectations by delivering a book which features some very arresting imagery at times. Her full page illustrations of Kentucky landscapes both set the scene and create a dark mood for the story to be enveloped in. They are brilliantly colored and make heavy use of shadow, as in one such image which features a horse bending down for a drink, both it and its reflection in the water a silhouette to the orange and red of the sunset behind it.

In other scenes, the artwork is less polished, more rough around the edges. These scenes tend to occur when the characters are at their most frazzled, and the art is used to heighten the emotions. Throughout the novel the female lead, a firefighter named Ursa, is constantly berated or subjected to sexist comments by her male colleagues, one of which is her brother. In one scene in particular, when tensions during a fire are at their highest and her brother makes a disparaging remark to her, the art goes haywire as the words echo in her brain and we are made privy to the weight those words carry in her mind.

Such scenes add to the surreal quality of the story. At another point Rafi, an illegal immigrant and the story's male lead, is remembering his journey from his home in Mexico to America, and the flashbacks end up distorted. The people that help him cross the border are portrayed as literal coyotes, walking upright and wearing clothes, while the border guards ride around on pigs. The sketchy nature of the artwork conveys these more surreal elements of the narrative very well.

It is only when the story is at its most ordinary that the art fails it. Occasionally when characters are interacting with one another, as Ursa and her fellow firefighters do in a moment of quiet at the firehouse, the characters' poses are exaggerated to the point of abstraction for no clear reason. In other instances, the facial expressions of the characters become almost grotesque in order to fully convey the range of emotion they might be feeling. Sometimes Novgorodoff takes this technique a bit too far, as can be found in a scene towards the end of the novel in which Ursa and Rafi are having a conversation which is overwrought with emotion.

Aside from the inconsistency of the artwork, the story itself feels incomplete. There is not much of a plot to the book in the first place, with Novgorodoff focusing more on mood and theme, bending the plot in contrivance to bring her two main characters together to talk. But when the novel finally reaches its conclusion, there is no clear resolution to what has happened; it just ends. The characters too are rather thinly sketched. We learn a little about Rafi's background in flashbacks, but Ursa is a cipher. We only see what she deals with in the present and only get a slight insight into her head in occasional bursts. Both characters have their hardships they must face, Rafi that his family is so far away and Ursa the torments of her colleagues, but these details are all we know of them.

Overall, Slow Storm is an interesting debut that is full of mood and quite beautiful when it is at its most abstract. But the novel never fully gives over to its surreal qualities, hanging them on flat characters and a threadbare plot. Sadly the novel falls short of expectations as there is not enough meat to it to really satisfy its audience.

`Slow Storm' is the humble story of Ursa, a distant female firefighter whose life seems to be going nowhere; picked on & picked at by her thoughtless insensitive peers, little by little eroding away as each day passes her by, slowly becoming numb. But then one day her destiny collides into that of another: a frightened illegal immigrant named Rafi, a man who loves horses and seems to live within his own soft daydreams.

What caused me to purchase this comic right on the spot was its utterly surreal & awing artwork. Smooth, graceful hand-written lines against a sunset of lush watercolor, it is visual poetry.
So often these days, comic artists attempt to create an `edgy' or `strange' style, but in the process their artwork loses its emotion, its human element. Novgorodoff's art is dreamlike, yet also deeply spiritual, portraying raw feeling in the characters' very stances. Fantasy meets reality, exaggerating both halves seamlessly.
Beautiful, elegant, surreal, & majestic: this is the artwork of a true master.

The story is a simple one, an enigmatic slice-of-life tale. It too is intensely lyrical, yet also very mild. As a short story, both literally & figuratively, it can only grasp you for so long. None the less it makes for a gentle, sweet read on any rainy day.
In just a fragment of their lives... It's about the connection shared between two lonely strangers who need each other's warmth in order to survive on this cold vast planet called Earth.

3 & a half stars.

There is the beautiful artwork of an accomplished artist in the graphic novel, pen-and-ink and wash style. The brooding and moody imagery adds a lot to a simple story.

My take on the content is that it is realistic (as in the literary realism tradition that depicts things simply as they are, as with the works of Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola) with some vivid religious images in flashbacks. But at times there are fantasy-type elements: for example, coyote smugglers of immigrants are depicted as actual coyotes in human clothing (in the immigrant boy's flashback ). But, again, the content reminds me of literature in the realism style, oftentimes harshly realistic, with a typical unfolding of rather hum-drum, common place incidents.

This is both the charm and the weakness of this work The charm is that it has the feel of reality. It's a story in which there is a chance meeting between a female fire fighter, who is verbally abused by her jerk brother and also suffers some sexual harassment from male fellow workers, and a young male from Mexico who loses his barn home in a fire and doesn't really know what to do or where to go next. Like many works of visual art, a large share of the meaning is to be found in what the reader brings to the story herself.

The weakness is that, as charming as the artwork and the simple story are, the meaning and impact of the story are diluted because of a lack of much exposition or clarifying detail that could have made its meaning clearer. It's told so simply and tersely that the meaning is often camouflaged. An example that metaphorically illustrates my point is the conversations between the lady protagonist and the Hispanic youngster. Due to the language barrier, they just don't understand each other very much, except on an emotional level, but even this is hit or miss. The whole work is like this. It feels real, but it lacks clarity.

But at one point, the story-telling "mist" clears away for the lady firefighter to declare: "Ain't no spirits or intellects or divine innervention gonna swoop down and save you." This no doubt is one of the "messages" the author/artist wanted to convey, her protagonist's rebellion or rejection of religious upbringing.

So, generally, expect to enjoy the artwork, but you may not be particularly wowed by the story.

However, this is a talented and accomplished artist and author, who, if she strengthens the story-telling side of her abilities and skills, could produce some fine works in the future.