Witchblade #19 // Review
Detective Sarah Pezzini wakes-up to a knock on her door. It’s Jake from work. He’s telling her if they don’t get going, they’re going to be late to the crime scene. The irony is that there’s a crime scene in her bed. There’s a corpse of a naked guy in her bed. Lots of blood. She has no idea who he is. This is only the beginning of Witchblade #19. Writer Marguerite Bennett delivers one of the single best scripts she rendered for the series thus far in an issue drawn by Giuseppe Cafaro with color by Arif Prianto.
Evidently the naked dead guy in her bed has a name. His name is Robert Kammer. (Low-level detective work: she checked for an ID in his wallet.) The responsible thing to do would be to call-in to work and let them know what happened, but she’s going to do something illegal. She’s going to dump the body into the river and then report it. (She’s got kind of a lot going on right now and it would be a bad idea to become a murder suspect given her line of work.) And anyway: she’s on the trail of the woman who DID kill Mr. Kammer.
Bennett opens with a sharp detective noir sort of a beginning and shoots the narrative through fragmented memories and another investigation on the way to the big combat at issue’s end. The opening is such a shock and it's so compelling that it's kind of a distraction for some of the early actions and the issue. There's this whole other investigation that's going on that has nothing to do with the dead guy in her bed. But that's really a strong enough impact that it becomes a major distraction. It's nice that Bennett is able to get back to that rather quickly.
Cafaro could have done more to tumble the page in disorienting direction given the whole situation of Sarah and her fragmented memories about what had happened. Given the fact that the script is as pleasantly disorienting as it is, it's actually a very clever idea to simply deliver the visual in a very straightforward manner. That's exactly what Cafaro does. It's pretty short stuff that includes some dramatic nuance and some very sharp and slicinglly well-executed action of issue’s end. Prianto’s colors to a striking job of adding atmosphere to the page particularly where the blood is involved. There's sound very clever use of shadow as well.
The detective more feel of this particular issue is pretty powerful. And the feeling of the darkness encroaching from every end is a lot of fun as well. It's really interesting to have the particular crossover that's going on in this issue hit when it does. Bennett is doing a really good job of orchestrating everything. But until this moment, she hasn't really had a single issue that's felt quite as powerful as this one has. It's just really well executed from beginning to end.
