Customer Reviews

Witchblade Volume 5: First Born

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This is an excellent addition to the series. Bringing together book 4 and adding to the original first born story. I've read both Vol. 5 and the TPB for first born and Vol. 5 is more comprehensive and cohesive if you have read Vol. 1-4. Must have for the witchblade collector.

This book contains a healthy dose of Stjepan Sejic's excellent art work as well as Ron Marz's consistently good writing. It also features a stitched binding, which is normally only seen in better quality hard cover books. This is the way trades should be done as it allows you to see the entire page as well as preventing any pages from falling out. This volume includes 9 issues as well as all the extra material and the upgraded binding for a retail price of only $17.99 which is a particularly good value. Hope to see more like this in the future.

I'm not that terribly familiar anymore with WITCHBLADE or, come to think of it, a lot of the other Top Cow titles. Regarding WITCHBLADE's mythology, I know that the Witchblade itself is a tremendously powerful supernatural artifact wielded by NYPD homicide detective Sara Pezzini, and that this is a very dark comic book series.

In fact, the Witchblade is ridiculously ancient and sentient and has had countless bearers throughout history. Taking on the semblance of a shapeshifting gauntlet, its higher purpose is to serve as a balance between the Light and the Dark, the two primal forces of the universe. The Witchblade is actually an offspring of Light and Darkness, created long ago to cement a truce between the two primal forces. Except that, now, the truce is over. All because Sara Pezzini is about to have a baby. This last part is news to me, having lost touch with the series and just now picking it up again.

Okay, so sometime ago Sara learned that she was inexplicably pregnant, despite her not having gotten it on with anyone for a while now. Concerned about her baby's safety, Sara had relinquished the Witchblade to a dancer named Dani Baptiste, who also happens to be the daughter of Sara's police captain and for whom the Witchblade had revealed an affinity. The storytelling makes it pretty easy to pick up on all this.

NYPD is baffled by a recent spate of murders in which incinerated corpses are featured, and you should know that weird cases like this one crops up all the time in Sara Pezzini's city. WITCHBLADE is gritty police procedural meeting supernatural hoohaa, and it's a cool concept. Although, for the bulk of this volume, the Law & Order angle gives way to the otherworldly stuff.

WITCHBLADE Vol. 5 collects all three issues of Top Cow's hit crossover mini-series FIRST BORN and also issues #110-115 of the regular WITCHBLADE series. FIRST BORN chronicles the epic face-off between the agents of Light and Darkness as they contend for possession of Sara's baby. Along the way, we learn just how special this child is and also the identity of the father. In the course of all this, the Darkness, Dani the current Witchblade, and Patience the current Magdalena get embroiled, drawn together to protect the vulnerable Sara and her baby. I'm not fully caught up on much yet, but I do recognize life-changing events when I see them. This applies even to Jackie Estacado, a New York crime lord and also the human host of the Darkness. Big things happen. The first several WITCHBLADE issues reprinted here are tie-ins to FIRST BORN, while the last three or four issues are basically stand-alone "let's catch our breaths" episodes as Sara and Dani cope with the aftermath of the FIRST BORN arc. There's a creepy ghost story here and a moment, on moving day, in which Sara's cop partner and boyfriend loses his Man Card.

Is this where I talk about Stjepan Sejic's phenomenal artwork? Or maybe I should start with veteran writer Ron Marz, whose CrossGen stuff I really dug. I don't know how long Ron Marz has been writing WITCHBLADE, but I know that he brings a clear storytelling style and a good grasp of character narrative. There's a lot in the dense Witchblade mythos which could've hopelessly bewildered a new reader or a catch-up reader like me. Under Marz' pen (or, probably, keyboard), it never got confusing. The interesting thing is that I find it difficult to pick a side, Darkness or the Light, as their respective minions all seem pretty shady. In fact, the servants of Darkness come off as the lesser evil. And the Angelus, well, she's pretty reprehensible.

There's a Cyberforce sighting, which startled me until I remembered that Top Cow publishes Cyberforce. But the cameo fits, tying in with the Angelus's search for a human vessel sturdy enough to contain her/its celestial essence. The story arc feels epic. There's a feel of big, big things unfolding. The Angelus and its heavenly warrior hosts are salivating for battle, eager for the kill. The Dark, independent of Jackie Estacado, is laying out its machinations. It's all leading to a desperate last stand and a whopping big fighty fight. All the while Ron Marz allows us to soak in the inter-relationships, the uneasy alliances, of our lead characters. Sara, the Magdalena, and Jackie Estacado have distinctive enough personalities that it should be fairly easy to set them straight in readers' minds. Only Dani Baptiste, the current Witchblade, seems a bit bland.

Room for romance, if you're into that mush, for Sara and Detective Patrick Gleason, and also for Dani and a mysterious stranger. But I'm not invested in these characters enough to truly give a fig. But, okay, I've always liked Sara Pezzini.

This trade also comes with an intro by Robert Kirkman (Yay, Invincible!) and a 21-paged gallery reprinting various artists' covers to the FIRST BORN crossover event (including Stjepan Sejic's gatefold cover).

Ron Marz can tell a story, no doubt about it. And I don't want to dis the other artists in this bunch of issues, because their stuff is also pretty nice. But the overwhelming draw has to be Stjepan Sejic, who does the artwork for the FIRST BORN mini-series and whose digitally painted artwork is utterly spectacular. There are some awesome panels of the Darkness and the Angelus duking it out. And the women look... well, they look like what I would've wanted to ogle at when I was 14 years old. As it is, I'm glad Sejic paints his warrior women in mostly full armor because, that way, I don't feel quite so dirty and inappropriate. One reason I'm sticking with this series is that Stjepan Sejic, as of issue #116, has become WITCHBLADE's regular artist. Because, once in a while, I like to read a comic book in which everyone is just so damn sexy looking. Then, afterwards, I prefer to cry into a big pillow.