Without the fleet, without the satellites, without the warning buoys—what remains is the weather itself, alive and listening. Johansson and artist Malka Dvir crack open the folklore of storms and make it sing: a brine-soaked, neon-scorched odyssey where barometers lie and thunder speaks in ciphers. Beyond the Storm is a graphic novel that drags climate myth into the present tense and dares you to stand in the eye.
Something inexplicable happens to Greywater, Maine. A cyclonic structure—locals call it the Needle—drops anchor over Blackcap Lighthouse, sheathing the town in flickering auroras and slicing every road to the mainland like wet ribbon. Tides turn to glass. Compasses point inward. As the Needle conducts its "measurements," citizens find their secrets broadcast as lightning maps across the night. Ari Vega, a former storm-chaser turned physics teacher, is caught at the center—stalked by a sentient squall that knows her real name—while Coast Guard captain Tomas Hale, trapped with his Zephyr-class cutter Rook in a harbor that no longer obeys geography, draws the unwanted attention of an intelligence the fishermen only call the Gauge.
In this start-to-finish reimagining of weather-as-cosmos, Johansson and Dvir deliver a coastal gothic of pressure lines and penance, where the next gust might be a message or a verdict. The Tempest Line's flagship title fuses small-town intimacy with abyssal-scale wonder, charting a course through memory, guilt, and the physics of grief—until the sky itself asks who deserves the calm that follows. Collects Beyond the Storm #1-6.
If you vibed with Mireya K.'s Salt Atlas or the modular storm journals in Jonah Lark's Cyclone Diaries, this sits in that space where weather is culture and maps are arguments. It balances maritime grit with luminous weird, giving each chapter a distinct meteorological texture without losing the human thread.
Readers who like atmospheric horror tilted toward science, or who collect coastal tales with a speculative slant, will find plenty here: a sentient squall stalking a former chaser, a cutter stranded in logic-sick water, and an art style that gleams like wet slate. It is ambitious, occasionally knotted, mostly triumphant.
Ari's wary precision and Hale's duty-first stubbornness ping off each other in clipped, believable exchanges, but their grief sometimes reads like a weather report rather than a crack in the hull.
The book wants to ask a grand question: "does the sky decide who earns the calm afterward?" It is a haunting idea, and the coastal gothic trappings fit it well.
But the motifs get telegraphed so often that the resonance dulls. Pressure lines mirror guilt, ciphers mirror secrets, and by the third iteration the answer feels pre-decided instead of discovered.
Craft-wise, this is meticulous. Johansson slices the six-issue arc into clean pressure shifts, pairing Ari-centric interiors against Hale-on-deck logistics to keep the gears meshing. The paneling favors narrow verticals that echo the Needle and then bursts into wide aurora spreads for emotional release, a smart structural rhyme. Lettering choices for the thunder-ciphers guide the eye without choking the page, and the color theory carries meaning rather than mood alone. A few transitions land a touch abruptly between issues, but the throughline of measurement and confession holds steady and the final cadence feels earned.
I am floored. The Needle over Blackcap, the auroras rippling like sea glass, a town whose instruments lie to its face, and the weather listening back. It is big, eerie, and beautifully precise at the same time.
Malka Dvir paints pressure systems like constellations and gutters like isobars; when the thunder speaks in ciphers you can almost hear the crackle in your teeth. Every blue-green wash feels brine-soaked, then neon-scorched, like two climates arguing on the same page.
The lore clicks. The Gauge is a rumor with teeth, the Rook is trapped in a harbor that forgot its map, and the tides turned to glass make every step feel like a verdict. The scope swings from abyssal to intimate without losing its bearings.
Ari Vega walking under a sentient squall that knows her real name gave me chills. Compasses point inward, secrets flare as lightning maps, and the panels lean into that uncanny logic where a storm is both weather and witness. I kept stopping to stare because the sky felt alive.
What a statement for a flagship. Beyond the Storm is coastal gothic reimagined, a science ghost story about guilt and gravity and who gets a second chance. I loved it, wholly, and I cannot wait to stand in this eye again.
