Withcblade #25 // Review
Sara has been through kind of a lot lately. Normal people don't have to deal with half of what she has to deal with just in the line of duty. But then there's this whole thing on top of that. The supernatural. Nevertheless, it's kind of strange for her to find herself suddenly in the Vatican. And suddenly in danger. And this is exactly where she finds herself in.Withcblade #25. Writer Marguerite Bennett and artist Giuseppe Cafaro enter a whole new plot arc with the coliring team of Arif, Felix Hidayat, and Sakti Yuwono for Prianto & Co.
Sara is just a homicide detective. She’s just a member of the NYPD. There’s no reason why her late father would have had a secret door to the Vatican. He and his partner with the NYPS had been altar boys together. (Her dad was a cop too.) But a door to the Vatican? That’s a little weird. So is the fact that she’s being attacked by a sexy woman wearing red armor that’s coated i na million crosses. Sara went through 12 years of Catholic school. She doesn’t want to attack. The Witchblade, though? It DOES want to attack.
This is the first part of a whole new arc for the series. Benett has decided to allow Sara an opportunity to speak directly to the reader via narration for the opening of the issue. This makes for a fun, little starting point for anybody who might have been curious about this particular version of the story. It's also an opportunity for established readers to check in with everything that's been going on thus far. Bennett is able to do this without breaking a forward momentum on the overall run of Sara’s life and everything that’s going on in and within it. Impressive pacing for the first issue of the third year of the new series.
Cafaro does a really good job of selling the action in the issue. The drama is pretty well laid out as well. However, it's the action of the aggression of the violence between Sara and the defender of the Vatican that really moves things forward in an appealing way. There's such an elegance about the way Cafaro draw the action to the page. And the coloring team does such a good job of delivering a solid sense of depth and radiance about it. On a purely visual level, it is such a well executed issue.
It really isn't much of a transition between the last plot arc and this one. The basic introduction to the story that Sara provides at the beginning of the issue is absolutely necessary as there really hadn't been much lead in to the plot arc that's going on here. It seems like a sudden and jarring shift. There hadn't really been any foreshadowing of what was going to be going on here. It clearly comes just completely out of nowhere. And that might be the one small flaw in an otherwise satisfying story.
