Whiteout (graphic novel)

AUTHOR: Rucka, Greg

ARTIST: Steve Lieber (illustrator); Dave Gibbons (cover artist); Mike Mignola (cover artist); Frank Miller (cover artist); Matt Wagner (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Oni Press

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1998

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1999

Publication History

Whiteout was originally serialized in four thirty-six-page issues published by Oni Press in 1998. The limited series was the first of several creations for Oni Press by writer Greg Rucka, who had previously established himself through his work on many titles for Marvel Comics and DC Comics as well as a series of novels featuring hard-nosed New York-based security consultant Atticus Kodiak. Artist Steve Lieber was known for his work on titles as Hawkman (1993-1996), Conan the Usurper (1997), and Grendel Tales (1997). The individual issues of Whiteout were slightly reformatted and published as a collected graphic novel in 1999. The following year, Rucka and Lieber collaborated to create a sequel, Whiteout: Melt.

Plot

After killing in self-defense a prisoner under her supervision, U.S. deputy marshal Carrie Stetko has been exiled to Antarctica and stationed at McMurdo, an American base. She is the sole law enforcement officer on the continent and one of just two women in a wasteland of ice and a sea of men. Despite the privation, the harsh environment agrees with her feisty, self-reliant personality.

The base is preparing to shut down for winter’s eight months of darkness when a man’s body is discovered on the ice. Carrie visits the scene, noticing core sample holes drilled nearby. Presumed to be a member of an international field-research team, the corpse is unidentifiable, its features obliterated. The body is brought back to McMurdo for autopsy. A footprint taken indicates the dead man is American Alexander Keller, a late addition to the research team.

Tracing the missing members of the team via radio link, Carrie flies with pilot Delfy to Victoria, the U.K. base, where researchers Siple and Mooney are staying. There, Carrie connects with Lily Sharpe, a British intelligence agent.

Following a lifeline, the women set off through whiteout conditions to the men’s living quarters, where they discover Siple and Mooney, dead. Masked in winter gear, the killer stands over the bodies. He attacks the women with an ice hammer, knocking out Lily and chasing Carrie into the storm. The killer cuts the lifeline and leaves Carrie at the mercy of the elements. In zero visibility, Carrie stumbles upon a storage shed, crawls inside, and passes out. Lily regains consciousness, finds Carrie, and summons help.

Suffering from frostbite and exposure, Carrie is flown back to McMurdo, where the doctor amputates two fingers on her right hand. After recovering, Carrie flies with Lily to the South Pole’s Amundsen-Scott base, where missing researchers Wesselhoeft and Rubin have surfaced. Carrie encounters the supposedly deceased Keller and realizes that something went wrong in the identification process. She chases Keller, but he disappears outside. Meanwhile, Lily discovers the bodies of the freshly murdered Wesselhoeft and Rubin. Keller is eventually discovered and captured. With him is a cache of core samples; they are solid gold, worth thousands of dollars, and represent the motive for the murders.

Back at McMurdo, Carrie and Lily determine that the prisoner must have had an accomplice with flying skills. The only suspect is Haden, since Delfy’s movements are accounted for. Haden attacks Lily, and she stabs him before collapsing. The doctor, also an accomplice in the gold-smuggling scheme, treats Haden and tries to persuade the wounded man to escape by snowmobile to a nearby base. Thinking the doctor wants the gold for himself, Haden attacks, but the doctor kills him with a wrench. Carrie interrogates Keller and confirms the doctor’s role in the crimes. She confronts and arrests the doctor. He confesses that he has sewn another two hundred pounds of gold into the autopsied corpse, which is to be loaded onto a cargo plane removing the last of the departing base personnel. When the plane leaves, Carrie and Lily stay behind in Antarctica.

Characters

•Carrie Stetko, the protagonist, is a tough and determined U.S. deputy marshal. An attractive, freckled woman of about thirty, she is recently widowed. She has been relegated to Antarctica for killing a vicious rapist-murderer in her custody.

•Brett MacEwan is a U.S. marshal and Carrie’s boss. A humorless, demanding middle-aged man, he is based in Hawaii.

•“Furry” is the doctor of McMurdo base, so nicknamed because of his untrimmed hair and beard. A stocky man in his fifties, he is one of Carrie’s few friends in Antarctica, though he ultimately betrays her trust through his involvement in the crimes.

•Lily Sharpe is a British intelligence agent, though she never admits it. Tall, blond, attractive, and capable, she served in Macao before being posted to Antarctica.

•Bates Rubin, Weiss, Siple, Mooney,and Isaac Wesselhoeft are members of a field-research team working in Antarctica. They are murdered by Keller.

•Alexander Keller is a young American geologist-geophysicist and a co-conspirator in the gold-smuggling scheme. Clean-shaven with long blond hair, he is at first presumed dead but later discovered alive.

•Lieutenant Byron Delfy is a Naval Support Force Antarctica pilot. Young and friendly, he is a casual acquaintance of Carrie because of previous flights she has taken with him during her sojourn in Antarctica.

•John Haden is a pilot who flies out of Mawson base while serving Australian interests in Antarctica. A well-built, bearded man in his forties, he is a major conspirator in the murders.

Artistic Style

Appropriate to the stark setting, the artwork throughout Whiteout is entirely black and white, except for the cover of the collected series, drawn by Frank Miller, which displays the title in red beneath a high-contrast rendering of the heroine in an action pose. A splash page completed by a different artist introduces each of the collection’s chapters. The first chapter’s artwork, by Matt Wagner, is minimalist, placing a body with a head obscured by blood against a plain white background. The splash page for chapter 2, by Mike Mignola, is a chiaroscuro piece that shows a gun-wielding Carrie charging through a doorway. Chapter 3’s introduction, the work of Dave Gibbons, is a highly realistic rendition of Lily rushing toward someone holding a gun in a gloved hand. Lieber, who illustrated and lettered the remainder of the volume, completed the chapter 4 splash page, which depicts Carrie supporting a battered Lily.

Lieber’s style transitions smoothly from simple line art to highly refined close-ups and from silhouettes and rough blocks of light and shadow that indicate a faster pace to screened sketches that separate flashbacks from live action. Always readable, Lieber’s drawings are realistic yet loose enough to retain a cartoonlike feel. Images are sufficiently detailed to set scenes and provide visual interest, but they are never so busy or overworked that they detract from narrative flow.

Layouts range from standard three- or four-tier pages for atmospheric expository or introspective scenes to wide horizontal panels for long views. Border-breaking verticals suspend time during fast-moving action scenes. Two-page spreads provide visual emphasis. Constantly shifting arrangements of panels of varying size and shape, presented from a variety of perspectives, not only help maintain interest but also underscore the book’s tension: The reader does not know what to expect next.

Themes

Virtually every work of fiction concerns at least one of three conflicts: the protagonist versus one or more antagonists, the protagonist versus nature, or the protagonist versus himself or herself. Whiteout explores all three themes through terse plotting, appropriately stylized artwork, and narrative-advancing design.

First and foremost, Whiteout is a mystery. Protagonist Carrie Stetko, a law officer, is the only person in Antarctica with the authority to investigate crime. She must discover who has committed a series of murders and determine why and how the crimes were undertaken. In the course of pursuing her investigation to its conclusion, she is pitted against several wily, dangerous antagonists.

Second, Carrie operates in Earth’s most hostile environment. Antarctica is an agoraphobic’s nightmare: a monochromatic wilderness with few landmarks at best and a howling fury of white at worst. The climate outside is unforgiving; hypothermia, frostbite, disorientation, and death are everyday risks. The climate indoors is claustrophobic and equally unkind. An outsider because of her job and gender, Carrie works within a closed community primarily composed of men, many of whom subject her to subtle and blatant sexual harassment.

Finally, Carrie battles herself. A grieving widow with no solace from family or friends, a disgraced officer seeking redemption through work, and an isolated woman surrounded by potential enemies, she must summon up reserves of inner strength to overcome physical and emotional difficulties that would break lesser characters.

Impact

A worthy addition to modern comics, Whiteout upholds contemporary trends by depicting violence and incorporating rough language. The graphic novel is unusual in its introduction of a believable strong, intelligent, and conflicted woman who triumphs despite tremendous obstacles and retains her femininity while performing a typically male occupation in male-dominated surroundings. Carrie is a fully rounded character with a strong personality and distinctive, snappy speech patterns.

Whiteout is a realistic extension of the hard-boiled tradition. The two-fisted, sharp-tongued, angst-driven hero of yesteryear was updated and modernized for Rucka’s earlier Atticus Kodiak novels. In Whiteout, the tough investigative crime fighter has been transformed into a woman. Rucka went on to further examine the feminine psyche in his British television-inspired and multiple Eisner Award-winning espionage series Queen and Country (2001-2007) and his noir-flavored Stumptown series (2009- ).

The setting is likewise unusual. An intriguing venue for a mystery, the unrelenting sameness of Antarctica’s terrain presents major visual challenges that illustrator Lieber skillfully solved. Rucka and Lieber were obviously compatible, and the two reunited for the sequel, Whiteout: Melt, and worked together on several other comics.

Films

Whiteout. Directed by Dominic Sena. Warner Brothers, 2009. This film adaptation stars Kate Beckinsale as Carrie Stetko and Tom Skerritt as the base doctor. The film differs from the graphic novel in two significant ways. First, Lily Sharpe is transformed into male investigator Robert Pryce (Gabriel Macht), eliminating the novel’s competitive and sexual tension between the two female characters. Second, the plot is a hybrid, combining elements from Whiteout and Whiteout: Melt, two very different novels. This conflation of two stories resulted in a diluted, unfocused film that received neither commercial nor critical success.

Further Reading

Azzarello, Brian, and Eduardo Risso. 100 Bullets (1999-2009).

Lapham, Dave. Stray Bullets (1995-2005).

Rucka, Greg, et al. Queen and Country (2001-2007).

Bibliography

Grant, Steven, and Stephen Mooney. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation—Dying in the Gutters. San Diego, Calif.: IDW, 2008.

Johnson, Nicholas. Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2005.