Reviewer: Ryan Day
Dreamhunter00@hotmail.com
Quick Rating: Great
Story Title: My Girl, or Far Too Much About Snakes
Suggested for mature readers.
Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?
Writer: Bill Willingham
Artist: Shawn McManus
Colorist: Pamela Rambo
Letterer: Nick Napolitano
Cover Artist: Tara McPherson
Editor: Mariah Huehner
Being a recurring character in
The Sandman is Vertigo's answer to being an X-Man: Sooner or later, you're probably going to get your own series. Lucifer, Mervyn Pumpkinhead, Bast, the Corinthian and the Dead Boy Detectives have all had their turns in the spotlight, to varying degrees of critical and commercial success. The one series to really stand out (other than
Lucifer, the sole ongoing series) was
The Thessaliad, starring Thessaly, the immortal witch and former lover of Dream. Vertigo has picked up on what made that series successful, and applied it to her second series.
Vertigo's making an obvious attempt to separate Thessaly from the previous line of
Sandman spinoffs: Gone are the surreal McKean-like collage covers, replaced with a more light-hearted, if somewhate gruesome, painting by Tara McPherson. The book also relies less on the "created by Neil Gaiman" angle and more on the people actually working on this book: Bill Willingham, who's turned himself into a hot property with
Fables, and Shawn McManus, who illustrated Thessaly's first appearance in
Sandman and is nicely credited as co-creator, alongside the usual "Gaiman, Keith & Dringeberg" credit. The story itself requires no understanding of
Sandman whatsoever, and this first issue recounts all the relevant happenings from
The Thessaliad.
Thessaly is a very old witch, though she looks no more than 25. She's neither a good witch nor a bad witch: She has no desire to either eat small children or flutter about handing out jewel-encrusted shoes. All she really wants to do is be left alone to go about her business, reading and studying. Naturally, one doesn't live for thousands of years without picking up a few tricks and making a few deals, but for the most part Thessaly is a perfectly harmless and polite person.
Books about harmless and polite people keeping to themselves tend not to sell a lot of copies, though, so Thessaly comes home from the market one day to find a horrendous monster waiting for her. After dealing with that, she's visited by Fetch, an old, dead, acquaintance who proposes a business venture that Thessaly, quite sensibly, wants nothing to do with.
The book will seem like familiar territory to fans of
Fables. There are plenty of serious things going on -- like witches, monsters, ghosts and golems -- but Willingham keeps the tone light. Thessaly’s reaction to the aforementioned horrible monster is "Oh dear. Here we go again", and the entire episode is treated with all the seriousness of finding a spider in the bathroom. The conversation between Thessaly and Fetch is reminiscent of Willingham’s Snow White and Prince Charming, with the somewhat goofy Fetch presenting his wild and crazy scheme to the ruthlessly practical Thessaly. Given their conversation, and the subtitle of the series, it would seem that Willingham is trying to find the often-sought, never found perfect balance between
Sandman and
Ghostbusters.
Shawn McManus’ art follows the tone of Willingham's story, and you’d be hard-pressed to indentify him as Thessaly’s creator in
A Game of You. The monster strikes the right balance between scary and silly: Yes, it has awfully big, sharp teeth, but it also has blue skin with pink spots. Thessaly, with her big round glasses and librarian looks, never looked like a millennia-old witch who’d kill a god if it were in her best interests, and McManus has made her look even more harmless here. Fetch, meanwhile, has a beady-eyed, Dagwood Bumstead quality. Thessaly seems more "real" than her supporting cast: Like Fetch, the Italian townspeople have a more cartoonish quality to them, while Thessaly is usually quite detailed; she often looks like an escapee from a John Byrne book.
Thessaly seems an odd choice to devote one miniseries to, let alone two. She doesn’t have a whole lot of dramatic motivation other than getting even with people who tick her off, and she simply doesn’t have the desire to go out on adventures and quests. At the very least, she’s the sort of character you’d expect to see in a grim, quintessentially-Vertigo story about the costs of immortality, possibly involving a battle for her soul with some sort of demon. Instead, Willingham has essentially put her in the middle of a caper flick, with absurd monsters and a bungling sidekick. It’s a decidedly bizarre thing to do, but it also represents an evolution in Vertigo’s approach to
Sandman’s cast of characters. Instead of trying to continue the series in all but name and hiring people to write the sort of stories Neil Gaiman might write, they’re taking some of Gaiman’s ideas and allowing creators to really run wild with them.
Thessaly: Witch for Hire is probably not the sort of story Neil Gaiman would write. But one suspects it’s the sort of story he’d enjoy.
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