5 out of 5

With each successive issue of James Stokoe’s second Orphan entry, Bath of Blood, I’d stare at the cover for literally a couple minutes, marveling at the compilation of imagery and wondering what it would all come to represent from the issue. …Only to discover, after a read, that all that chaos is exactly what we’re getting in the issue. It seems impossible, even when rereading the series, but a “normal” book would go all out on a cover to kind of extrapolate and over-emphasize some major thing or things that happen in the contents, while in a Stokoe book, it’s like the cover can barely contain showing a slice of everything you’re getting. It’s wild stuff.

The first Orphan story suffered from not exactly the opposite problem, as plenty happened in that series, but maybe the fact that Stokoe kind of had to rush ahead to world-build so that successive tales could seem appropriately massive, making the massiveness of the preceding tale feel somewhat nebulous. Said in another way, a lot of artists do these kind of “fight comics,” where it’s all about the action, and they can be awesome but, inevitably, a little empty. So James tried to give us a lot of groundwork to counter that emptiness in series 1, while also doing fight comics, and the focus didn’t quite square up. Sometimes books have the problem of doing a whole bunch of setup before getting to the meat, and it wasn’t exactly that – it was shifting the meat up front while doing setup in the background.

But: Bath of Blood shows that paid off. Because Orphan Mo can spend these four issue kicking all sorts of creepy ass, and the divide between storytelling and action is much more natural, as the heaviest lifting is already done; the world is weighted – this has value and character depth beyond the battles – making the quieter moments work just as well as the insane ones.

Otherwise, for more general intents and purposes, the top-down story is the same: there’s another beast Mo must fight; it seems unstoppable. That there’s a setup for another series (whew!) maybe tells you whether or not she wins, but it can’t possibly tell you – even when studying these covers ahead of time – how insane Stokoe’s creativity is, merging a love for camp and splatter and classic samurai tropes altogether, while never tipping over into something that feels overly parodic or b-movie-ish. And we also already have a small cast building, with a town inspector thrown into the mix and some returning faces from series one… it’s brutally tight storytelling, with no word or panel wasted, and yet makes a four-issue tale feel as epic as some widescreened 12-issue series out there.