3 out of 5

Man, Chuck Austen can be so weird. Not in any of the various ways those of you familiar with Austen might figure – his writerly tics / focuses that reoccur – but just the way a loosely edited Austen strings his sentences together can be utterly bizarre. In this Witchblade oner Chuck wrote in 2003, gauntlet bikini owner Sara is telling us about something she hears scratching under a bed, describing the approximate location of the sound as “…that exact spot where a coin would roll if you dropped it,” okay, pretty good so far, “and desperately needed it to get out of the parking garage.”

…What?

To be clear, there’s no parking garage in this scene, before or after. There’s no reference to a parking garage elsewhere. Not that that would make this metaphor better – it’d be way to on the nose – but at least it’d give you some reason for the image to have been drawn from the ether. It is, otherwise, a very random and distracting reference, neither being something that Sara / people would just casually say, or making the scene stronger in any way.

This is the most flagrant example from the issue, but I’d extend this to the whole book. Part of that is kind of charming, adding to the quirk of kicking off with a locked room murder mystery that backs into the deployment of Sara’s Witchblade to battle baddies; part of that is just… weird.

It’s early 00s; Austen tries to do strong women in that early 00s, Image way – they wear thongs and own it – and tosses out some early bids for better social awareness by lecturing a dum-dum cop who ignores a comatose witness, but then Sara also calls that same witness diseased… But there’s some fun stuff here, for real, with good characterization for Sara and her cop partner, and even if the “mystery” gets super clunky, I like that Chuck tried to do something to the left of standard fightin’ babes Image stuff. Artist Scott Benefiel goes wild with angles – sometimes to the detriment of readability, but the pages are fun – and colorist Brian Buccelato livens things up significantly, countering my expectations for what books from this era normally looked like. Lastly, Dreamer Design’s letters give the book a lot of character, which is probably the best summary for the whole thing: weird, quirky, etc.; it has a surprising amount of character.