Luna Snow – World Tour #1: A Snowy Reception

After the events of One World Under Doom, Luna Snow’s career experiences a sharp decline due to her ties to the one time Emperor of the world. Hated on both sides for siding with and then later fighting against Emperor Doom, Luna is subsequently fired by her agency in favor of a new pop star, Vibe (no relation to the DC Comics character). As Luna tries to figure out what’s next, some weird happenings around Vibe pull the K-Pop star back into the spotlight. 

Luna Snow has so far been a character that struggles to justify her existence. Like Dazzler before her, Luna is a character created for a very specific purpose. While Dazzler was created because Marvel had a partnership with Casablanca Record in order to latch on to the disco craze at the time (wherein she was originally modeled after Grace Jones before being changed to resemble Bo Derek), Luna Snow was created to market Marvel’s Future Fight mobile game to the East as well as try to capitalize on the growing international influence of K-Pop. However, while Dazzler would manage to mostly escape her one-note novelty status thanks to Chris Claremont using her during his critically-acclaimed tenure on X-Men (specifically during the book’s “Outback Era”), Luna Snow remains firmly in Marvel’s “Asian Corner”; a place where essentially all of Marvel’s notable asian characters (White Fox, the current Iron Fist, Aero, Wave, Jimmy Woo, Silk, and a few others) are sent until an event comic where they are shoved into a random team book for a few issues (though Luna is a playable character in the currently very popular Marvel Rivals game). 

Coincidentally, this story takes place right after such an event, as it serves as an epilogue of sorts to the “Doom’s Division” book that started Luna and the rest of her team, South Korea’s Tiger Division, as they at first enforce Doom’s rule until they learn the truth of how he came into power where they would subsequently rebel along with the rest of Marvel’s heroes. This book kind of flirts with tiptoeing on just how the decisions made in that story affect Luna’s career, but ultimately doesn’t do much with it.    

While usually a fairly solid writer, Greg Pak doesn’t really give the reader much to chew on in this story like he would do in his much-praised Hulk run from a few years ago. A couple of questions are proposed as to Luna’s identity after she is fired as well as the wider impact her initial support of Doom could have on her life and career, but they are pretty much just seeds to be planted (but likely never harvested) by whoever pulls Luna’s name from the hat next. She doesn’t really grow or learn anything new over the course of the story. Things sort of just happen to her and she reacts. 

Ario Anindito and Takeshi Miyazawa make for a solid pencilling duo, and Yen Nitro’s eye-catching colors lead to a few genuinely interesting moments visually, but they don’t do much in the way of enhancing the overall story.