WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Black Panther #21, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ryan Bodenheim and Daniel Acuna, on sale now.
Comic book fans know that Storm has never been given her proper due on screen in an X-Men film, although her weather control powers make her one of the most powerful Omega-Level mutants on the planet. She's also the kind of woman who can stand on her own, a self-rescuing princess of the highest order, whose relationship with T'Challa in the Black Panther comics is a love story of two heroes, arguably equal in power and personality.
In Black Panther #21 from Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ryan Bodenheim and Daniel Acuna, Storm turns out to have several new abilities that make her even more powerful. Some are obvious offshoots of her weather-controlling skill. The power to grow plants at an accelerated rate, for example, is merely the logical endpoint of having the talent to optimize the proper sun to rain ratio. One could even argue her newfound power of levitation is based on wind control, taking the air and forming it into a column that pushes against gravity to raise her off the ground. But her powers in interstellar space, where there is no weather to control? On the surface, that's a radical departure from her other powers.
Storm's Got a Brand New Bag (Of Tricks)
The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda has been a little like Black Panther meets Star Trek, a blending of Afrofuturism with the sleek designs of space exploration. But while Emperor N'Jadaka sips tea in his quarters of the Imperial Flagship and Princess Shuri prowls the bridge of her starship, the Mackandal-1 looking for Captain M'Baku's missing ship, Storm doesn't lead this way. She's floating above the floor in her quarters, legs cross, calm as a cucumber. "We'll know when it's time [to attack]," she says.
When it's time, her attack is something no one sees coming. She does not blow ships out of the sky. Instead, using telekinetic abilities, she calmly reaches into the ships' life support systems and starts adjusting the micro-climates within them. In space, the ability to breathe is vital. Without air, no one can hear you scream.
Storm's attack decimates the opposing fleet, leaving N'Jadaka alone on his ship with no crew. (He doesn't need life support.) Like her other new powers, this merely takes the traditional skills of the character and reconfigures them for space. After all, what is weather other than the ability to control the air we breathe, the water we drink, the stratosphere that shields us from the sun's more harmful rays? One of the reasons that Storm is so powerful is that the logical endpoint of what she can do could devastate the planet in an instant. She could create cloud covers so dense it would destroy all life, leaving the planet a gas ball like Venus. Or she could take away the weather that helps support the cycle of life on the planet, leaving Earth as dead as Mars, if she so chose.
Moving the action into space means that weather is now an artificially created atmosphere inside these self-contained hunks of Vibranium and metal that propel themselves through space. How would Storm's abilities translate to such a scenario? She'd be great at terraforming a lovely Earth-sized planet, should the Wakanda fleet happen upon one. But in Coates' telling, those artificial systems that create tiny Earth-like atmospheres within any ship should also be her domain. These new abilities make Storm an even more formidable foe and a stronger ally.