Witchblade #12 // Review
Detective Sara Pezzini has survived the trial of the body. She’s survived the trial of the mind. And so now she’s wodering: “What monster is left for me to face?” That’s when she recognizes her father from within the sickly green mists. So maybe this is...the trial of the heart? This may well be the case in Witchblade #12. Writer Marguerite Bennett concludes thea first year of the new Witchblade with artist Giuseppe Cafaro and colorist g anyway. Arif Prianto. The beloved long-lived supernatural horor fantasy drama closes-out its first year with a largely satisfying 12th issue.
So maybe her father never really died And maybe And maybe her mom never really left. And maybe her little sister’s still there. And ,maybe everything is wamr and stable and perfect. She never took revenge. She never enlisted. She never joined the academy. But there’s something about the sound of hte news filtering-in around the edges of the happiness. There’s something about it all that she knows is wrong, but she doesn’t know what to do about it. So all she can do is turn to her father and kill him. Because she knows he’s dead. And she knows that this isn’t right.
The hero gets tempted by something that she might have that will resolve everything. Only thing is: she knows that it’s not going to be good enough. The island of the lotus eaters. The temptations of Christ. This sort of thing has been echoing through heroic fiction for long enough that even Joseph Campbell made note of it. Bennett does a solid job of driving home the horror of a fantasy deferred as Sara makes her decision...and then she has to live with it. There’s a lot of action on the page, but the real heroism is Sara’s resilience.
Cafaro renders the action of the series with a sense of urgency. There’s a solid sense of forward momentum about the action on the page as it all moves across the page with a great degree of drama. The mysticism of the conflict is given some degree of intensity by colorist Arif Prianto, but the central power of the action comes from the juxtaposition between characters on the page and the raw human emotion that is flowing from panel to panel. Though there is a definite impact in what the art team is bringing to the page, the fantasy of the life the Sara is being offered doesn’t quite hit with the kind of dreamy intensity it would need in order to feel the kind of mixture of horror and fantasy that Bennett is crafting for the page.
The series ends its first year on a pretty intense cliffhanger. The work continues to feel impressive as Bennett and company continue to develop the action. Thankfully Campbell is taking her time with the reboot of Sara. Any character who has been around for as long as Sara is going to have a lot of different possibilities in rebooting various stories that have played-out over the years. It’s nice to see Bennett taking her time.
