Presumably, Storm spent a lot of time in Africa when she was married to the Black Panther (or maybe not, though I have never read any of those issues I remember them being temporary members of the Fantastic Four). While not technically part of the “Lifedeath” cycle of stories (there was once going to be a “Lifedeath III,” but when it fell through Barry Windsor-Smith adapted it a non-X-related independent project), the story in Storm #3, “Return of the Goddess,” refers back not only to Ororo’s African origins, but to “Lifedeath II.” As far as I have been able to determine, this is the only story since the two issues in the 1980s I examined in the previous posts to address this time in Storm’s life and those previous stories. In this final post, I am examining Storm #3 (November 2014), written by Greg Pak, with art by Scott Hepburn (pencils and inks), David Baldeon (pencils), Jordi Tarragona (inks) and Rachelle Rosenberg (colors). Despite their shortcomings, I still think these two comics are among the best of mainstream comics of the 1980s. In Part Two, I examined “Lifedeath II,” which finds Storm in East Africa struggling to find herself in her motherland, and the story’s creating of a space to imagine the voice of the typically voiceless subaltern subject, even if ultimately the comic continues to fall short of a representation that does not genericize “Africa” as a place. In Part One I examined Uncanny X-Men #186, which features the story “Lifedeath.” In it, I began to work out a parallel between Edward Said’s notion of the “textual attitude” and the pedantic adherence to superhero comic book continuity, and how even laudable attempts to develop unique and interesting identity narratives for black superheroes is marred by the gravity of that attitude.

This post is the third and final part of a series on X-Men’s Storm (aka Ororo Munroe) and the relationship of identity and colonialism in three comic books featuring her.

Storm, Vol. 1 by Greg Pak