Review by Win Wiacek
The world is a magical, wondrous place stuffed with miracles and mysteries. However, there’s not one single atom of it that depends on the eldritch, mystic or supernatural and none of it – or the greater universe around it – is wrought from the efforts of supreme beings or operated on principles of forgotten lore denied us common folk.
It’s all explainable, utterly rational and absolutely subject to revision by us every time we find out or disprove something that previously has been a puzzle. To do otherwise is nothing less than a crime against humanity.
No gods, no ghosts, no witchcraft, no magic crystals. Got it?
Tim Minchin is a creative whirlwind and multi-media entertainment polymath. He’s very smart, very funny and doesn’t believe in goblins or faith-healing. In 2006 ‘If You Open Your Mind Too Much Your Brain Will Fall Out (Take My Wife)’ was a ninety second diatribe refuting the plausibility of astrology, psychics, homeopathy and an interventionist god. In 2008, after a close encounter with a pontificating new-agey nitwit at a party, the reasonable, rationalist Mr. Minchin took his ire and indignation and turned it into a piece of true inspiration: a beat poem, Socratic dialogue and “anthem for critical thinkers”. It’s a very funny, edgy slice of entertaining refutation and I-wish-I’d-said-that-ism used as the closer for the Ready For This? Tour for more than two years.
In Britain animators/illustrators/producers Dan Turner and Tracy King saw the show and determined that at all costs they must turn that paean to logic and sense into an animation and, as described in the introduction by Minchin and the afterword by Turner and King, after some wheeler-dealing, they did just that.
Storm became an internet sensation, and has been reworked into an astoundingly compulsive and scathingly funny graphic novel. It opens at an intimate soiree in North London where the narrator and his wife sit down to sup with friends and are force-fed a stream of nonsensical blather by a beautiful girl with a tattoo of a fairy. Her name is Storm and unlike the occasion that prompted the entire sequence, this time the quiet man she inanely and arrogantly lectures is not going to hold his tongue.
By turns tense, barbed, hilariously evocative and furiously cathartic, this stunning visual feast delivers the barrage of scathing sense we’ve always wanted (but been too polite) to unleash on evolution-deniers, pseudo-scientists, astrological aromatherapy advocates, vaccination-withholders, ghost chasers and every other stripe of pontificating irrationalist in a graphic tumult of colour, line and typography that will simultaneously stun and galvanise.
Storm is an edgy pictorial tour de force that will delight and enchant readers who love the funny and fantastic but never forget where the horizons of fantasy end and the borders of imagination begin.
