The Witching #1 Review

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Reviewer: James Hatton
Story Title: Fly Me to the Moon

Written by: Jonathan Vankin
Penciled by: Leigh Gallagher
Inked by: Ron Randall
Colored by: Brian Miller
Cover Artist: Tara McPherson
Publisher: DC/Vertigo

I swear to god I did this review a couple of weeks ago. Oh! Wait! That was Marvel’s title ‘Witches’ which is their look into 1970’s horror comics meets the WB and Doctor Strange. This comic is ENTIRELY different you see, as The Witching is what happens when a 1970’s horror comic meets the WB and the Vertigo-Verse. My bad. I’ll try not to let that happen again.

Story!

Elsa Grimston is the blonde hottie born with a moon-spirit.

Sook is our Korean hottie who likes fast cars and magick.

Kara is our goth hottie who ironically is the skeptic.

Put these three together and we are going to have ourselves a wacky little coven of miscreants. Involved already is a historical plot point involving magic and UFO science from the Third Reich, Elsa’s father who seems to have conceived her to help lay waste to the world, and Lucifer himself who seems to have his little hand in the girls meeting each other.

It’s not generally my standard cup of tea, but the first issue was such a grouping of stage settings that you really don’t know everything that’s going on yet. I’m not saying the book is messy, but it’s setting itself up for the long set-up arc and you can’t really get a grasp on much yet.

Art!

First off, the cover of this issue is eye catching. I dig her style and it generally fits the book.

The internal art is the closest you can come to call the Vertigo House Style. The lines are thick and decisive; the coloring is very clean and a bit flat. As I said earlier, this book has that horror book feeling, but as it would be done today. The final panel splash of our favorite ruler of the circles of hell is so picture perfect, you would have thought they drew it directly from his DC Bust.

Overall!

It’s hard to conceive of what the hell happened in this issue, so it’s even harder to give it an overall generalization. I’m just going to wait for issue 2 to find out if it was worth my time. As a first issue though, it wasn’t anything exceptional – not to mention that it assumed you even knew who Lucifer Morningstar was. Anyone not primed in the Sandman mythos might get a bit further lost in it.