Author: Greg Rucka
Publisher: Oni Press
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrated and lettered by Steve Lieber"
This is the second of three reviews of work by Greg Rucka. Whiteout is written by Rucka who has an article on strong female characters. Whiteout is also yet another really uninspired title as B&N's website shows - there is a over dozen stories with this title on their first page of results alone.
This is volume one of a graphic novel series. It was also made into a sorry excuse for a movie of the same name in 2009 starring Kate Beckinsale. Other than its title and the name of the lead character, the movie has nothing whatsoever to do with the graphic novel. That they even pretend it does by using the same title and main character's name is, in my opinion, nothing but a huge fraud. The novel is actually better than the movie, which is poor and is why I don't carry it in my movie review section, but that really doesn't say a whole heck of a lot about the novel.
The graphic novel is executed as really cheesy line-drawings, which were not that well done. It's like reading a comic strip in a newspaper - except one that's 164 pages long. I had a real problem in that the villain and one of the good guys looked the same to me. I was over 60% of the way into this before I realized that the two were different people - and they were not even of the same gender!
The action takes place in Antarctica, where a US marshal, exiled for some issue with her superior, is trying to track down a murderer. The story is readable; I didn't have any problem following it or finishing it, but it just wasn't any good.
Greg Rucka is a guy who has somehow become known for writing strong female characters, but I've now read two of his stories and I don't see anything special about either of them. In this novel, the main character is Carrie Stetko, the US marshal, who is later assisted by a female British agent (who doesn't even appear in the movie!). There seems to be a strong undercurrent of lesbian attraction going on between these two, which never goes anywhere. Maybe volume 2 pursues that, but I have no interest in reading another volume of this to find out.
Carrie isn't a bad character per se, but she's nothing special, memorable, endearing, or engaging. On a couple of occasions she's shown to be "tough" as exemplified by her being able to throw guys around, but that's not what people mean when they talk about strong female characters! Yes, it can include that, but there's much more to it than that. Other than that cheap-ass attempt at making her "strong", there was nothing about Carrie to recommend her. She wasn't particularly smart or inventive in her investigation, and she wasn't a brilliant cop by any means. The action scenes were pretty tired and lacking in interest.
There are some things which Rucka gets completely wrong. For example, he writes "Pome" when he means "Pommie" (an antiquated term to describe someone from Britain). There's an incident near the end when one of the good guys is being threatened with a gun, but the gun fails to fire because it's so cold that it froze the trigger, which in turn shattered rather than triggering anything. That struck me as too dumb for words. I mean, if it was cold enough to render steel that brittle, then it's sure as hell far too cold for people to be outside without full face protection (or even at all for that matter) as they were depicted here!
In short, I cannot recommend this novel, unless your taste in novels runs to the insipid, tame, pedestrian, and uninspired.
