Customer Reviews

Whiteout Volume 1: The Definitive Edition (v. 1)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Whiteout" and its sequel stand out as classics of the independent comics scene from the late 1990s. U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko is on the trail of a murderer in Antarctica...and since it's a mystery, that's really all you need to know to start out. The original mini-series was Greg Rucka's breakout hit, leading to his great runs on "Batman: No Man's Land," "Gotham Central," and other notable DC comics.

The most notable change for this "Definitive Edition" is the new 6 x 9 inches digest size; the original series was printed at a slightly larger 10 x 7.5 inches. The artwork is also newly re-scanned and cleaned up. According to publisher Randy Oni, "We relied on a third party vendor to scan all the boards [originally]. As a result of not having a tight control over digital production, many of the pages scanned dirtier than we would have liked. Too many old pencil marks showed up... Some of the images were actually scanned at too low of a resolution. So, we rescanned the pages we could [for the Definitive Edition]. I then spent about 60 hours cleaning up every page, pixel by pixel in Photoshop... Also, Steve did some touch ups here and there." There's only one caveat here: this new edition does not include the Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Dave Gibbons, et al. cover illustrations.

If you haven't read the "Whiteout" series, now is the time to hop on board before the movie (starring Kate Beckinsale) and the third mini-series ("Whiteout: Thaw") are released in 2008.

Excellent graphic novel. Easy to read, compelling plot, artwork was fantastic. I'm a big fan of murder mysteries and serial killer plots, so this book was perfect. Look forward to reading more of Rucka's work.

What a great book! My only complaint is that it was all over so quickly, I wanted more, which made me glad there was a second volume.

What would be great is to see a movie version of this book. It could easily hold up with the right strong actress playing the lead. Especially since reading it felt like watching a movie. A really well-done, tense thriller.

Because of its cinematic quality, this is also a good entry book for adults that don't read comics or realize what the medium is capable of.

I highly recommend it.

United States marshal Carrie Stetko investigates a series of murders in her posting, which is Antarctica. The Kate Beckinsale movie was based on this graphic novel. The novel is better. Not a masterpiece, but exciting, suspenseful, much more plausible in plot, with the kind of black-and-white drawing people of the generation before me could see daily in the best action comic strips. And since it is a graphic novel, the creators don't have to spend a fortune on special effects, they can let imagination to the work. That said, they do have a better grip on what the environment is like that the director or the actors did. (Sorry, very sweet Kate.)

One implausibility bothers me. Marshal Stetko doesn't look like Kate Beckinsale, she looks like a real woman, short, cute not beautiful, freckled. She also has an abrasive manner, a foul mouth, and is quite willing to get physical with men. I don't think female police officers of any service act like that. I do know that small men tend to over-compensate but small women? Oddly enough, the creators confirm my doubts by giving Carrie a female helper, a British secret agent named Lily Sharpe, a woman investigator who is, well, sharp, a thinker, a quick reader of people, an excellent bluffer.

I had heard that this was a good comic but was not expecting it to be as fantastic as it turned out to be. While reading this book I felt embedded in a previously unknown world: life on the bases of Antarctica. As his international crime thriller unfolds, Rucka introduces readers to the extremes of surviving the killer cold of Antarctica and its international politics. Lieber's art is perfect for bringing out the bleakness and harshness of "life" down there. And in Marshall Stetko we have a very strong, very believable, and very rare female lead.

Read it now before you see the movie!

Above average writing and drawing, but the visual impact is reduced because the publisher decided to reduce the page size by about an inch in both directions. That's a huge difference in visual clarity. Remember the comics wrapped around Bazooka bubblegum? It's like that. Why would the publisher take a superior book, brag about the digital remastering, and then shrink/sink the result? Bet they saved a few $ on printing costs.

Greg Rucka's crime series set in the Antarctic, "Whiteout," is collected in its entirety in this 128 page Oni Press trade publication. For whatever reason, this trade has been shrunk from its original comic format to slightly more svelte dimensions, slightly diminishing the high quality penciling of Steve Lieber. That said, fans of Rucka and crime storylines will likely find this at best an interesting and rather unexceptional read.

I wanted to like it. Really, I did. But right after I initially began reading it, picking up and reading this graphic novel felt more like a chore. My interest died about one third of the way in and I just could not compel myself to go further.

I found the main character, U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko, to be childish at best, irritating at worst; therefore, I just could not muster any desire to care about her or her conflicts; hence,

I did not find the mystery behind the killings portrayed in Antarctica to be compelling. I'm uncertain whether this was due to a flaw in pacing or narrative structure, which failed to drag me into the main conflict quickly enough to become irrevocably immersed in the author's fiction, or just my lack of care for the main character that carried over to the story as a whole.

Or maybe it was the artwork...

The story is set in Antarctica and is illustrated in black and white, "pencils only". I thought this would set the right tone for the story, in fact, it was a major factor in deciding to purchase this graphic novel in the first place; however, although a few panels do manage to drive home the environment's barren landscape and appropriate feelings of isolation, on the whole, the drawings felt crowded and somehow "dirty", for lack of a better word. At times, too many of what should have been background details within a panel were overdrawn, making certain scenes seem manic. I believe a stripped down, understated drawing style would have been more successful. These issues only managed to further blow my focus on the story.

It is my understanding the original series was printed at a slightly larger size than this edition. Scaling down the artwork could easily account for it appearing crowded, dirty and a slew of my other criticisms; however, since this is the currently available edition, they remain inexcusable.

Like I stated in the "TITLE"These two volumes pretty much sums up the available story lines contained there in. ITS cold and snowy, oh by the way did I mention that's ITSCOLDANDSNOWY!!?? The art work is pretty decent and the story lines are pretty much what what you would expect using such a setting. The lead character,a hardened Jodi Foster, "Silence of the Lambs" type deserves more varied settings if future stories are to be considered.She's interesting,Flawed,Kicked around by a higher power, but , yet she still retains a sense of fair play and justice. Watch for the Movie "WHITE OUT" just released this past weekend. 9/12/09 Sincerely, LARRY "O" ,Pgh., Pa.

I was excited to read this graphic novel in anticipation of the movie. I found the characters so unlikeable that I almost did not finish reading it, but I stuck it out in case I wanted to see the movie. Readers should be aware that this is very much an "R"-rated novel and it appears the movie decided to follow suit, which is another disappointment for me.