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A review by elenavarg
Joe Hill's Rain by David M. Booher, Joe Hill
2.0
So disappointed. Damn. Such a mediocre story…such a waste of a talented artist (Zoe Thorogood gets both of the stars I’m giving this).
SPOILERS AHEAD:
The cover (and the alt-covers) give the impression that this is a lesbian love story set in the apocalypse. In truth, one of the women on the cover dies in the first 20 pages and the rest of the book is all about the protagonist dealing with this.
Joe Hill (the pen-name of Joseph King, the son of Stephen King…is this nepotism?) wrote the intro to this comic, as ’Rain’ is an adaptation of a short-story of his with the same name. The thesis of his introduction is that writers shouldn’t ”write fiction with a message” and indeed, ”stories should avoid messages”.
In the SAME INTRO Hill laments on how he is horrified of the vehemency with which people deny climate change and how in creating the story of ’Rain’ he wondered ”maybe [nails raining from the sky] would be climate change people couldn’t ignore”.
How can you say you’re not writing stories with messages, when you’re LITERALLY writing about the horrors of climate change? How, when in your own story, a young woman, who was cruelly disowned by her own homophobic family, finds a new, accepting family and learns to love again? And when that same loving family is ripped away from her, learns to love YET AGAIN?
For gods’ sake, a literal hate crime happens in your story and the walking-talking homophobia-machine (the laziest excuse of a bigot I’ve seen in a while) who did the gruesome crime, gets killed in the same way as revenge? The messaging in this story is layered so thick, I don’t think Hill even noticed it’s there.
As for the rest of story, it’s not very interesting. The protagonist walks 30 miles, witnesses a hate crime, takes revenge on the bigot, walks back and discovers the apocalypse was caused by one of her neighbours. There’s a cult there, but after beating up the protagonist once, they do NOTHING for the story.
Not my place to say if this is bad or not, but all the Black characters in the story die horrible deaths (except for a little boy the white protagonist and the white (secret) antagonist take care of)…and race is not addressed EVEN ONCE…and the whole creative team of this comic is white…this all left a bad taste in my mouth.
SPOILERS AHEAD:
The cover (and the alt-covers) give the impression that this is a lesbian love story set in the apocalypse. In truth, one of the women on the cover dies in the first 20 pages and the rest of the book is all about the protagonist dealing with this.
Joe Hill (the pen-name of Joseph King, the son of Stephen King…is this nepotism?) wrote the intro to this comic, as ’Rain’ is an adaptation of a short-story of his with the same name. The thesis of his introduction is that writers shouldn’t ”write fiction with a message” and indeed, ”stories should avoid messages”.
In the SAME INTRO Hill laments on how he is horrified of the vehemency with which people deny climate change and how in creating the story of ’Rain’ he wondered ”maybe [nails raining from the sky] would be climate change people couldn’t ignore”.
How can you say you’re not writing stories with messages, when you’re LITERALLY writing about the horrors of climate change? How, when in your own story, a young woman, who was cruelly disowned by her own homophobic family, finds a new, accepting family and learns to love again? And when that same loving family is ripped away from her, learns to love YET AGAIN?
For gods’ sake, a literal hate crime happens in your story and the walking-talking homophobia-machine (the laziest excuse of a bigot I’ve seen in a while) who did the gruesome crime, gets killed in the same way as revenge? The messaging in this story is layered so thick, I don’t think Hill even noticed it’s there.
As for the rest of story, it’s not very interesting. The protagonist walks 30 miles, witnesses a hate crime, takes revenge on the bigot, walks back and discovers the apocalypse was caused by one of her neighbours. There’s a cult there, but after beating up the protagonist once, they do NOTHING for the story.
Not my place to say if this is bad or not, but all the Black characters in the story die horrible deaths (except for a little boy the white protagonist and the white (secret) antagonist take care of)…and race is not addressed EVEN ONCE…and the whole creative team of this comic is white…this all left a bad taste in my mouth.