WITCHBLOOD #3 – An Honest Review

In WITCHBLOOD #3, available from Vault Comics on May 26th, 2021, Yonna tracks down the Hounds of Love to a shed witch who steals the eye of children.

The Details

• Written By: Matthew Erman, Lisa Sterle
• Art By: Lisa Sterle
• Colors By: Gab Contreras
• Letters By: AndWorld Design
• Cover Art By: Lisa Sterle
• Cover Price: $3.99
• Release Date: May 26, 2021

Was It Good?

Storywise, this issue is a little bit of an improvement over the previous issue in that there weren’t so many nonsensical plotlines or characters acting unnaturally. The story progressed along a path (almost), and you get a setup of sorts to lead you into the next issue.

The parts of the story that don’t work well are the threads (one in particular) that go nowhere. The entire gist of the issue centers around finding the next witch with sight powers, but when the witch is found, the thread is cut short before it’s completed.

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The other down on the writing is the characters. Everyone in this issue is an awful person to one degree or another. Yonna is friends with a seer witch that spends her days ripping the eyeballs out of children that pass by. Despite a half-hearted request asking her to stop stealing children’s eyes, Yonna simply doesn’t care. And this is supposed to be the “hero” of the story.

What about the art? Truthfully, I was very down on the art in the last issue. It looked roughly sketched and incomplete. Unfortunately, none of those issues have been corrected here. There are several panels that look like they were sketched out in 5 minutes and sent off to be colored.

In short, slightly better writing, albeit with wholly unlikable characters, and art that looks good in some panels but looks terrible in just as many more.

What’s It About?

[SPOILERS AHEAD – Click here if you just want the score without spoilers]

We’re introduced to Yoshi, a shed witch who steals the eyes of passersby, particularly children.

Next, we catch up with hex hunter Atlacoya, the woman who ran Yonna off the road way back at the beginning of issue #1. Read our reviews of WITCHBLOOD #1 and WITCHBLOOD #2 to get caught up. YAtlacoya is recovering from the tussle outside the diner. when she sees the news that children’s eyes are getting snatched. She makes arrangements to hunt down the Prophetic Witches of Sheds as penance for her failure to complete her previous mission.

It is helpful that Erman is establishing a larger world in these little conversations. There are Orders and Organizations and Gangs with their own agendas. The caveat with this approach is that we’re consistently being told about these groups and relationships but we don’t actually see it. An organization of witch hunters could be cool, but we never get more than little snippets of narration and dialog to hint at the organization’s existence without any clear understanding of who they are or their mission.

Yonna casts a spell on her familiar crow, Bhu, that turns him into a crow/bloodhound hybrid so he can sniff out a trail of divination magic. Yonna hopes the trail will lead them to the vampires’ next target. The spell works well, and Bhu leads them to Yoshi’s shed.

Cut back to Atlacoya who’s meeting with a man in a diner. On her request, he brought her a stack of receipts for everyone who’s bought a shed in the vicinity in recent years. They talk about the her work and Atalacoya laments the amount of research she has to go through to find the shed witch. Atlacoya and the man talk about the cruelty of life and he laments how his nephew was one of the kids that had his eyes torn out when he was walking by a shed across the street.

This scene takes too long and ends in a face-palm moment. If Atlacoya is such an expert hex hunter, wouldn’t the logical first step be to examine the area where the children had their eyes ripped out instead of asking someone to collect a large stack of purchase receipts? I think this scene was supposedly meant to end in a comedic twist but it landed like a stone balloon.

Yonna enters the shed and she says ‘hi’ to Yoshi. They apparently go way back and sit for some tea. It’s odd how this scene plays out because Yonna acts with no urgency about the approaching vampires. It’s only brought up as a casual fact near the end of their conversation, when suddenly, Atlacoya bursts through the shed door.

There’s a brief tussle, but Yonna gets the better of Atlacoya. Just as Yoshi steps in to take one of Atlacoya’s eyes, she’s lanced trough the chest by a spear of light from the sky. The Hounds have arrived and they’re using accumulated magic from the witches they’ve drained to form deadly weapons.

Atlacoya runs away. Yonna hides close enough to see what’s going on. And Yoshi is killed. This is the main plot point we mentioned in the first section above. The whole purpose of this issue, which was to stop the vampires from getting Yoshi’s divination blood to divine the next stop to get to Esme, just ends short.

The vampires arrived at the last minute, they unceremoniously kill Yoshi, but you never see them take her blood to divine the next stop on the map. The whole point of the series, beating the vampires to Esme or at least stopping them from reaching her, is barely a blip in this issue.

We conclude the issue with the introduction of a new player to the story.

How Does It End?

What A Reveal! Glimmer Sparkle! Majestic, Impressive, Amazing!

Final Thoughts

WITCHBLOOD #3 improves on the prior issue by its lack of plot holes, but the slapdash art and weak story structure make it hard to find reasons to continue this series.

Score: 5.5/10