Writer: Greg Rucka
Artist: Steve Lieber
Oni Press, collected in 2007
It is hard to flaw this story. Whiteout was written in the early days of a master-writer, Greg Rucka. In 1999 Whiteout was nominated for the Eisner awards “Best Writer”, “Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team” and “Best Limited Series”. This revisitation of Whiteout, written seventeen years after its publication, considers why it was so applauded and how it has held up. (In 2007, Whiteout was made into a movie featuring Kate Beckingsale. We do not consider the motion picture in this critique.)
In The First Circle is a book which was written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1968. It describes a research facility in outer Moscow where scientists useful to the Soviet Union are sent to because, notwithstanding their offences to the state, they can assist the state. When not useful, the inmates can be sent immediately to gulags in Siberia.
Carrie Stetko is not useful. She is a US Marshal, disgraced after murdering a captured criminal. As punishment, she’s sent to the US base called McMurdo Station in Antarctica. It is not quite a gulag, but it is remote, extreme, and very dangerous. Perhaps most people think that Antarctica is an icy realm of penguins which has been tamed by humans by way of the existence of various research institutes. Whiteout makes it clear that Antarctica is brutal. Carrie herself loses three fingers in the first volume when she suffers from frostbite while chasing a criminal. “Rucka is doing a hard-boiled noir story, just one set in an alien and inhospitable place,” notes critic Greg Burgas at Atomic junk Shope Comics You Should Own – ‘Whiteout’ ⋆ Atomic Junk Shop .
In an interview for Comicbook.com (Greg Rucka Talks “Whiteout” and the Wonders of Kate Beckinsale! – ComicBook.com ), Mr Rucka says:
”Environment as a character intrigues me… I did a lot of research, reading of diaries of people who had been to Antarctica, accounts of expeditions, and lots more to learn all I could about this part of the world.
It is true that Antarctica presents as the occasional star of the show. But it is hard to get past Carrie in respect of characterisation. Carrie is a smart and relentless outsider. In many ways she reminds us of the fictional Russian police detective Arkady Renko, the lead character of Martin Cruz Smith’s series of novels beginning with Gorky Park. As a woman, though, she deals with a problem that Renko has never faced: she lives amongst hundreds of men, and even as Marshall bares her teeth to fend off the bored, sexually – frustrated, opportunistic jackals roaming the stations. She is snarky, aggressive and loyal (which to us sounds very stereotypically Russian). Carrie in our view is one of the most enduring characters in American comic books this century.
The first volume features an ice core researcher murdered outside McMurdo Station. The victim’s face is smashed in, preventing ready identification. Antarctica is (presently, and hopefully forever more) not open to commercial mining, and so is laden with gold deposits. The geologists who find the gold start killing each other over it. Carrie must find the murderers before they fly out with the missing core samples.
A British spy with nerves of steel, Lily Sharpe, appears on the scene: there is a fission of sexual tension between the two (and more on Carrie’s sexuality in a moment). It is in this story, in a heart-stopping, desperate scene, Carrie loses her fingers and barely saved by Lily from hypothermia.
Removing anything from Antarctica must be difficult because of the limited ports of entry. And so, in a macabre twist involving betrayal, the gold core samples have been placed during an autopsy inside the body of the murder victim.
In the second volume, entitled Whiteout: Melt, Carrie and a Russian secret agent must prevent an ex-Spetsnaz special forces team from absconding with Cold War-era nuclear weapons which have been illegally stored on a Russian base.
On the face of it, this plot summary sounds very James Bond, but, in reality, it is the over-confidence and arrogance of the Spetsnaz crew which leads to their downfall, rather than any against-the-odds 007 tactic by Carrie. Indeed, on a re-read, she could easily have been killed by the Russians had they not been disorientated and anxious to escape. Antarctica saves her.
The artist is Steve Lieber. Mr Lieber’s work is rendered in black and white. Without the crutch of colour to help identify the characters, he takes great care to render each of them as quite different individuals. Mr Lieber’s art reminds us of the art of spy adventure serialised cartoon strip Modesty Blaise, with its sketchy pencils. But Carrie and Modesty could not be further apart. Wikipedia notes that “The Carrie Stetko character was ranked 44th in Comics Buyer’s Guide‘s “100 Sexiest Women in Comics” list”. How ghastly. Despite a liaison, hasty and not especially romantic, with the Russian, Carrie is not presented in a sexualised way at all. The environment, where everyone must be bundled in thick clothing, removes any suggestion of sexuality.
Mr Lieber’s great skill in these stories is that of suggestion. As promised by the title, the art consists of a superabundance of white. Paul at The Pullbox.com observes (Pullbox Reviews Whiteout #1, the 25th Anniversary Edition ):
“At its core, this is a story with two antagonists- the murderer, and Antarctica itself, where temperatures hit an average of -34 degrees Celsius in the winter. Where the black & white really comes into play is when Carrie Stetko’s investigation takes her outside in the middle of a blizzard. The white takes over the page, and a reader is put into Carrie’s POV, minus the frigid temperatures.”
Mr Lieber allows the white to blot out parts of his artwork, as the howling snowstorm begins to fill each page. When Carrie chases the Russian mercenaries on the Antarctic, Mr Lieber uses enormous amounts of negative space to create a landscape which is bleak, and the endless white conceals lethal dangers particular to the frozen south.
A third volume in the series was promised in 2009, but has never appeared. Mr Rucka is a prolific writer and no doubt he has been distracted by his many other projects. What a shame, for this is a wonderful series of stories with an admirable protagonist and an intriguing backdrop.