Danica Novgorodoff’s Slow Storm

Mother Nature’s bag of calamity can deliver some life altering moments for people under the constant eye of approaching doom. Gustav slowly tears through the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, people evacuate from nearby coastal cities as impending hurricane forces threaten to destroy everything that it touches. The aftermath of a phenomena such as hurricanes and tornadoes changes the perspective of an individual for quite some time.  Danica Novgorodoff is a writer, painter, photographer, and comics artist that easily interlopes into the natural world of destruction that scars people for a lifetime. The graphic novel Slow Storm is a well paced visual anticipation of life in a metaphor of illustrated symbols. The mixed media in her panels are a storm juxtaposition of colors that give you a sense of awe.

A firefighter in rural Kentucky, Ursa searches for her place in life, struggling to meet her own expectations.  When a tornado hits her town, the ensuing chaos brings her world into sharp focus, somehow making everything clearer, and Ursa finds that she just can’t stomach the way her life is going.  It is then that she meets Rafi, an illegal immigrant whose life isn’t going the way he’d pictured it either.  Their encounter is the catalyst for Ursa and Rafi, who take different roads to the realization that wanting your life to change isn’t enough to make it happen.