Witchblade: Due Process-Top Cow/Image-$3.99
3 out of 5 stars
Summary: Sara Pezzini, the bearer of the Witchblade and police detective in NYC, is trying to right the wrongful imprisonment of William Hicks, who has been in prison for 10 years. Pezzini presents evidence at Hicks’ preliminary hearing that shows that Hicks is innocent. She says that the police officers who arrested Hicks did so in order to cover up their selling of illegal drugs and their murdering of their fellow officers. The board says they need 30 days to review these facts.
Hicks gets stabbed by his cellmate. Hicks is able to kill his cellmate without living a trace because he has received powers from a monstrous demon.
Three months later Hicks is released. Pezzini tries to help him, but he doesn’t want any help from the police. The demon shows itself to Sara and she tries to kill it with the Witchblade, but that doesn’t work. The demon says since it is only a voice, it can only be killed with words. The demon’s name is Agares.
William goes to see his “brothers,” others who are under the spell of the Agares. They tell him he has to pay for the protection Agares has given him and his family by collecting souls.
A lot of people think Hicks is a skinhead, because he has a shaved head and he has a cross tattoo on his neck that has swastikas around it (this is the mark of the “brothers”). Hicks goes to see his family but they don’t want to see him because of what he has become. A few black men see him and think he is a skinhead and make a remark about turning his daughter into a prostitute when she is older. William starts shooting at them. Sara tries to stop him. Hicks and his wife get killed by the thugs. Their daughter, Rebecca, is now an orphan. Both Agares and Sara give Rebecca an option for being with a new family, but it ends without revealing her choice.
Writer (Phil Smith): The storyline is pretty gripping. The reader hopes that Hicks will defeat both his actual demon and his personal demons, but he dies before being able to overcome either of them. Reminding us that time is too limited to keep on making the same mistakes. Rebecca’s choice also being left open-ended is interesting because she could take the same path as her father, Agares’ road, or the road that he denied when offered, Sara’s road. The reader gets to picture that she made the right choice, but also has to imagine that maybe the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.
One thing that did bother me however was Phil’s spelling errors in the section “The Demon Agares,” where he discusses what helped him create the character.
Illustrator (Alina Urusov): Alina’s drawings are amazing, especially the cover art, her depiction of the horrifying demon Agares, and the way she captures the actual terror Rebecca has when she witnesses both her parents being killed.
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