Happy New Year everyone. Sure, 2020 was garbage and it’s not really looking like 2021 is going to be a whole lot easier, but thankfully we have comics to help us through the tough times and help us stay in place and ride out everything that is happening.
Speaking of staying put and the dangers of going where you’re not supposed to, here’s “The Last Witch”.
Written by Conor McCreeryCover by: V.V Glass
Illustrated by V.V Glass
Colored by Natalia Nesterenko
Lettered by Jim Campbell
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a young girl yearns for adventure just beyond the hill and against the wishes of her parents and all common sense decides to go where she’s not supposed to and discovers that the world outside the one she knew is a lot more dangerous and threatening than she previously knew. Also, she can’t just go back because someone/something she cares about is missing and she has to get it back.
If this sounds a lot like a Disney princess movie, or Professor Campbell’s Hero’s Journey if you’re nerdy, then well done; you know your stories and so does the writer of “The Last Witch” #1: Conor McCreery. The entire first issue of the comic is a set up for the adventure ahead and McCreery does a very good job of making the characters relatable and likeable. The protagonist is a young girl named Saoirse who feels like an outcast, has a single friend who is a boy named Padraig, and wants to venture beyond the borders of her village to see something new and interesting. McCreery demonstrates a knack for writing characters in a relatable and natural way. The kids talk and tease like kids are supposed to talk and tease, the father may be a bit overbearing but only does it out of love, and the grandmother is quirky and a lot of fun, even if it feels like she knows more than she’s letting on. The mother suffers from the classic Disney curse of being dead at the time of the story.
If “The Last Witch” #1 has any problems, it’s that it’s all a very long set up with very little payoff, which creates a distraction when you realize how formulaic the story really is. “The Last Witch” #1 is a 38 oversized comic book that could be easily cut down to half its length and not lose anything. McCreery spends so much time setting up the characters in such familiar ways that he leaves other characters, settings, and the main threat of the story by the wayside. “The Last Witch” #1 is a story with great characters, but no real sense of time, purpose, urgency, or malice.
The Disney comparisons are rather apt in “The Last Witch” #1 because artist V.V Glass and colorist Natalia Nesterenko channel all the hallmarks of the Disney art style in this book. The art’s biggest strength is with the character’s faces, which have the classic big Disney eyes and highly exaggerated cartoon features that allow them to be incredibly expressive and emotional. It’s very easy to tell what the characters are feeling as they talk and run around and it all comes together to create something that even the youngest readers will find relatable and fun. On top of that the backgrounds are crisp, clean, and beautiful to look at. It’s a clean, kind of bleak winter land filled with beautifully drawn trees and cozy homes.
While the artwork on “The Last Witch” #1 is beautiful to look at, it’s dragged down a bit by a lot of the problems that plague the script. Since the story is so character focused, a lot of the pages tend to be made up of people just standing around and talking to each other and the big panels take up a ton of real estate that drag the pacing down. As for the colors, yes it’s easy to see everything and very pretty, but the story takes place on a sunny winter’s day, which doesn’t make the woods look too scary or intimidating. On top of all of this, the art goes for a very generic European fantasy aesthetic that we’ve seen a thousand times before. Again, it’s not bad, it just opens the book up to nitpicking readers (like myself) who notice little details that are off, like how the main character is able to write in perfect modern English or that the grandmother smokes what looks like cigars, which were a luxury for Old World Europeans from America.
All tiny details aside, “The Last Witch” #1 is a book meant for younger readers, which is a role that it mostly succeeds in. Children are capable of reading and processing complicated emotions that aren’t pleasant or fun to talk about, and they are capable of reading and enjoying stories that are a bit scarier and more complex than we give them credit for. “The Last Witch” #1 isn’t a bad book, but it could be better.
Final Verdict: 6.8- It’s a kid’s story with kid friendly art and a familiar storyline that is competently told and promises to be entertaining, but doesn’t do a whole lot to inspire or innovate.
