White Sky #1: Spooky Apocalypse

White Sky #1’s beginning is hardly original: a father and his young daughter make their way across an American wasteland. The creative team supplies virtually no background, though. The minimal story details lead to White Sky #1 being small on plot but big on establishing a rich world and atmosphere.

A big reason for the development of atmosphere over story in White Sky #1 is the minimal amount of dialogue. Harms is economical in everything he writes for David and Violet. This isn’t to say that every bit of dialogue serves to advance the plot. Quite the opposite, in fact. There is a lot of dialogue that does nothing but build up the two main characters and their bond. For instance, there is an exchange between Violet and her father about how Violet can no longer remember her mother’s voice and how she fears that if the two of them lose a locket with a picture of the three of them, she will no longer remember what her mother looks like. The thing that is absent is unimportant conversation or banter, and the issue is better for it.

Harms puts a lot of the actual storytelling responsibility on Mavinga and Loughridge’s shoulders. White Sky #1’s first seven pages, 32 panels in total, feature a total of fourteen one-sentence dialogue bubbles. The immediate world, the San Francisco Bay Area, is left entirely up to the art team to describe. David and Violet’s trek across this landscape is similarly informed by Mavinga and Loughridge. Violet’s repeated slumped posture and staring down at the ground is more than enough to communicate her attitude. Falling snow speaks to something being wrong with the climate. Freeways full of abandoned cars, a decaying tank on the road, a tanker run aground–all of it speaks not just to a ruined world but one that was ruined a long time ago.

Loughridge’s color scheme isn’t overly bright, but it is still rich and alive. White Sky #1 doesn’t lean on a drained color scheme to perpetuate an apocalyptic-type wasteland.

David and Violet’s expressiveness almost runs counter to the environment Mavinga and Loughridge are selling. The world may be a horrible place, but David and Violet’s reactions to each other in quieter moments are those of a devoted family. David looks downright happily as he styles his daughter’s hair. Mavinga does this with surprisingly little detail. Some shading around the eyes and cheekbones adds to David’s features, for instance, but most of the emotion is conveyed via the shape of David and Violet’s mouth and eyes. This works especially well with the younger Violet.

The cause for the future wasteland isn’t entirely clear even at the end of White Sky #1. Harms points toward the world’s condition being the result of some kind of supernatural interference, but neither David nor Violet speak of it directly. And while the art is certainly suggestive, it still leaves things to the imagination.

During the seven page opening, there is a brief sequence of panels where David and Violet hide from something whose presence is only given away by a sound effect. This sound effect repeats late in the issue, establishing that the things Violet sees are the same. Dukeshire uses the same font and color for the sound effect each time and leaves it exclusively for the source of the threat.