From this year's big event, to a small-scale curio.

Ororo: Before the Storm kicked off last month by delivering exactly what it promised: a fairly standard adventure of Storm during her time as a thief in Cairo.  With issue #2, the book starts to look a little more interesting, although it also starts to seem a touch contrived.

Achmed el-Gibar rents out Ororo and two other thieves to a dodgy archaeologist, with a mission to recover the Opal of Ozymandias from the tomb of En Sabah Nur.  You can see where this is heading, can't you?  Actually, given that they're about the only two prominent characters in the Marvel Universe who are connected to Egypt, it's surprising that nobody's really done a Storm/Apocalypse story before now.  They make for fairly natural sparring partners.

Doing it as a continuity implant, on the other hand, seems a bit strange.  If we're actually going to get Kid Storm versus Apocalypse, then that would seem to cause all sorts of continuity problems - besides which, you really can't have an A-list villain like Apocalypse beaten by three kids, even if one of them does grow up to join the X-Men.  It looks rather like we're going to have Storm versus Ozymandias instead, which isn't entirely without problems either.   

In the meantime, what we get is Ororo and co making their way past Tomb Raider-style traps, while squabbling amongst themselves.  It's quite well done - most of the traps are done in montage form, and they're far more interesting that way.  Carlo Barberi does some excellent work selling the traps, too, particularly in a lovely slow-motion sequence with a falling block.

It's not desperately original, but it's undeniably delivering what it promised - and to be fair, doing it quite well.

Rating: B+

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