Comic Review: The Complete Witchblade Vol.1 (Image Comics)

Image Comics releases a collective edition of the Witchblade series from the beginning in this graphic novel of The Complete Witchblade on its first volume.

To be honest, I’ve never even heard of this series before, but if you’re like me, then this is the first time of witnessing this old school comic from Image, then I’m gonna give you a quick version because I’m not going through the whole story not until I learned the whole thing. Ok, so unlike Spawn by Todd McFarlene and Thanos, the series follows another superhero comic starting with the hottest girl in New York City, Sara Pezzini, who is a detective got shot before once and reported by merging that supernatural, sentient gauntlet to turn herself into The Witchblade. So the story goes, about a policewoman who fights crime for justice and ended up to be a superhero which much more like a celebrity to her, and that gauntlet is actually made of alchemy or is it such a thing of alchemy, which possesses humans, even women as hosts on this planet and she uses its power to fight supernatural creatures that invade in this planet, just until she mastered to use that power as well. The whole series is created by Marc Silvestri, David Wohl, Brian Haberlin, and Michael Turner. This whole comic has been running since 1995 up to 20 years which is October 2015 which the series has ended. It was spawned later into a tv adaption in the 2000s, along with the Japanese anime, manga, and a novel in 2006. And there is a lot of magic and monsters coming from this series.

So there are a lot of front covers that came out since the mid-90s, so I’m going to focus on this book’s front cover. Here it show a series of panels of the main character Sara Pezzini in action by wearing the Witchblade gauntlet that turned into an armor that can protect her. One of the images shows how this comic became very perspective of her actions and it makes every reader drool for her, obviously posing herself like that makes my face turn all red. Since this is a large graphic novel to follow up on the story, but I’m not going to do that. This time for the fans, I want to talk about the art style and the characters.

So the art is illustrated by Marc Silvestri, he discovered comics through his cousin who was a collector. Then he also discovered that one of the comics became familiar to the artists that he knows such as Jack Kirby, Bernie Wrightson, and John Buscema. His artwork is covered with one of the most iconic action scenes that were inspired from Marvel Comics, his characters approach with some unique action sequences such as this comic here about Sara Pezzini, at the beginning of the story, she started dressing very exotic clothes as the body proportions have shown that he studied life drawing while self-learning or art school. As much as I want to study their art styles, then I would understand where my art style was created. One of my illustrator teachers told me that some artists lay out some of the characters that were symbolized by using the shapes of each character proportions which is squish and squash and sketch, even it shows a subtle emotion whenever the characters are posing and express just to show the relationship between each other. In every human anatomy, every character needs to have some shape just to craft a convincing character. This comic though, the main character is shaped more of a pear-shaped or look at that Sara’s character shape and now look at Apple Magician Girl and Elemental HERO Burstinatrix card and animation from Yu-Gi-Oh! The body proportions are slender and make it more womanly and brave at the same time. So it comes to the theory that Marc is drawing some abstract shapes for the characters and slowly turned into a finished drawing. You can learn more from him on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzNSwn_js6U

>Now, let’s talk about characters, I already talked about Sara Pezzini, she’s hot and sexy, and obviously the conquerer of the sentient gauntlet until the end, and…. I dunno an idol to every adult male readers and such, the character design is very flawless. Then there’s her boyfriend who is Patrick Gleason, Sara’s partner in crime, and obviously makes him a supporting character or something. Then there we have Sara’s kid, however she’s not her daughter in blood but she’s some kind of a high school student, she’s going through shit after her real mother died. Then there’s that guy who possesses the gauntlet which he looked like he’s in a cult group wearing some traditional magician clothing and wields a Japanese sword, I don’t what’s his story, but he’s more like a guardian of the gauntlet, however, he has more knowledge of the gauntlet than Sara does. There are a lot of characters that I don’t know, but I’m going to figure it out sooner or later.

The story is quite interesting to have a heroine to fight for justice by using a magic gauntlet of alchemy. Call me a philosopher, because the story is more than meets the eye. The investigation of murders leads to another loop of a battle against the enemies who disposes of people. There’s a lot of magic and occult-related kind of story that you’d like to follow through. This is something that makes magic feel so very powerful. So this completed part of the graphic novel is so rare that you can have it to your collection from this time to the next.