Deadly Storm

I love Castle and enjoyed the Nikki Heat books so I was looking forward to seeing an adaptation of Castle's earlier work. But the story didn't really seem to be suited to this format. Why didn't they just release this as an actual novel? It would have made more sense and probably been way more fun, given Storm's narrative voice that was given pretty limited range here. The plot seemed chopped up, as though there were a lot of missing pieces. And I'm not sure why they couldn't have just gone a little longer to help fill those gaps? I was expecting it to be longer. Like, why didn't we get to see (the fake) Mrs. Grout earlier, or even just a flashback of her hiring Storm, instead of finally getting a look at her with Storm pointing her out to us three-quarters through the story?

I liked the bits with Storm's father (some insight into Castle's character there, especially given his comments in the foreword about comic book heroes serving as father figures), but I thought his relationship with Clara Strike was pretty weak. (Although who cares, since she dies at the end! But they're going to have to bring her back from the dead if they do any more Storm stories.) The artwork was kinda bad in places (Sassy's hand while she is sitting at Pumpkin's desk at the station? It's like the equivalent of a whole paragraph that makes no sense plopped in the middle of a page. Fix that shit, yo!), and way Storm is drawn at the government-plan house in Nicaragua seems really inconsistent with the way he is drawn elsewhere.

But then, I read very few graphic novels, so maybe the choppy story and drawing errors are fine with everyone? I know this is mostly just a publicity thing – perhaps even mainly a shot at getting the show more male viewers? – and it's based off a novel that doesn't exist written by an author who doesn't exist, but still, I was hoping for more.