WE3, Witching Hour, Unfollow

Unfollow 18

I found the last issue.  Total crap. I don’t get the point of any of it, and I was totally right to drop it when I did.  

WE3 1-3

This miniseries never gets old.  It’s The Incredible Journey, only the animals have been cybernetically enhanced by scientists to be the ultimate killing machines.  And they have rudimentary speech.

The talking animals and the Frank Quitely art combine to make this a minor classic.  The three companions only want to go home, and it’s heartbreaking that they don’t know there’s no home for them to find.  They’re on a fruitless quest as the military hunts them down and the drugs keeping them going wear off. But they do their best, and their best isn’t too shabby.

The ending is way more upbeat than I would have imagined from Grant Morrison, but you’ll get no complaints for me.  GUD DOG indeed.

Regret buying: No

Would buy again: Yes

Would read again: Yes

Rating: Really good

Witching Hour 1-3

Jeph Loeb and Chris Bachalo combined to create this miniseries.  It must have been the talent that persuaded me to buy this, because it’s a really random story.  A coven of witches give a seemingly random group of civilians the opportunity to confront the issues in their lives, with magical consequences.  The “supernatural beings test regular humans” trope isn’t a new one, but Loeb approaches it from an angle that was unfamiliar to me. The people don’t really know that their actions will have not-normal reactions.  White, Gray, and the rest pop up in their lives and make cryptic remarks, but it’s not really a fair fight.  Let’s be honest, they’re just fucking with these people; They’ve already decided who they’ll punish and who will be given a second chance.  It’s not that their judgment is off, but it feels unsporting of them. They’re like cats playing with their food before settle down for dinner.

Something that confuses me: For the most part, the people get what they deserve - The therapist with a penchant for sexual assault gets caught.  The bartender who kills his wives dies. The gambler who agrees to bury the latest wife’s body dies. But it turns out that Red, who kills the gambler, was also the killer of the wife at the very beginning of the story.  What the what? Makes no sense that she’s also contract killing on top of her usual witching.

This is the best kind of Bachalo - weird but not incomprehensible.  I love how his intersperses his colored art with black and white static-y splashes of the main characters.  They accentuate the off-kilter interference of White and her crew.

White has the same perkiness as Bachalo's Death.

So q.

I like how Bachalo ties in the scarf visual throughout the series.  

Unconvention in its storytelling, this one could totally have gone off the rails.  But it all works somehow, and I came away from it pleasantly surprised.

Not the worst description of magic.

Regret buying: No

Would buy again: Yes

Would read again: Yes

Rating: Pretty good