09/23/2026
Anyone who knows me and my taste in comics knows I have a varied taste in books. From Ninjak to Batman, Scarlet Witch to Exquisite Corpses, the books I enjoy tend to go several directions. However there is a book that I enjoy that usually gets me a weird look. When I tell people that this book is my guilty pleasure, I either get the look that I'm a weirdo (which is fair) or that I’m a degenerate. So I figured I’d take a moment and discuss this book and it’s history to maybe explain why I enjoy this book so much, so let's not keep you all waiting and tell you the topic: let’s discuss….Witchblade.
Witchblade is the story of Sarah Pezinni, a young NYPD detective who finds herself bound to the mystical gauntlet known as the Witchblade, a powerful artifact that grants untold power to the bearer but mainly chooses women to wield it leading her into battles against mundane and supernatural threats. Sarah originally appeared in the Cyblade/ Shi Battle for the Independents one shot from 1995 which strong reception and clamor for more female led books led Marc Silvestri, Michael Turner, David Wohl, Brian Hamberlin, and Christina Z to flesh out the character more and give us the book we know it as today. And hey something must have worked, because the mix of female lead, supernatural action, and good girl art covers as they’ve been called, brought the series at its peak to sales figures of over 100,000 which in mid 90s to early 2000s wasn’t anything to scoff at. That’s also not to mention the numerous spinoffs and crossovers like: Darkness, Tales of the Witchblade, Wolverine and Witchblade, JLA/Witchblade, Spawn and even Invincible to name a few; plus an anime series, a manga, a novel and to top it off a live action tv series. All of which is pretty impressive for a book that people joke about as a T’n’A book.
So with all that, why isn’t Witchblade more mainstream than it is? Well I can think of a few factors in that, first and foremost being that it was a T'n'A book despite my defense that it’s more than that. The book was sold on sexy covers of Sarah with almost all of her clothes ripped open and wearing armor that barely covered anything despite that not being totally the case with the actual contents of the book. The anime didn’t fare much better, due to the fact that if you just listen to the audio from fight scenes and not watch the screen you’d almost think you're watching soft core p**n. All that does not make for primetime t.v or a book you can hand a kid (not judging but others certainly would.).
Another factor probably has to do with the story. While eventually the story would get to a point of being engaging, holding weight without throwing sc****ly clad women at you though to be fair it still did do that the first few issues didn’t have a strong story. That’s not to say characters and concepts weren’t interesting, hell the character Jackie Estacato got several books and remains one of my favorite anti heroes in comics, but characters, concepts and ideas would be thrown at you with little care if they stuck sometimes. Even with all that though, the book finally hit its stride going for an impressive 185 issue run ending in November of 2015. So that should be the end of it you’re probably asking, right? Well not exactly.
December of 2017 we got Witchblade volume 2 written by Caitlin Kittredge and art by Roberta Ingranata, starring a new lead in Alex Underwood. Alex, a former reporter now investigative agent for Witness Aid with the district attorney’s office, starts the series bonded with the Witchblade and is thrust into battling demons while trying to make sense of what’s going on now and in her past while also trying to discover how she became bound to the artifact. At first when I heard Witchblade was relaunching, I was excited having gone to my local shop and having it pulled for me. What I got was another story entirely. The book was disjointed, the art was good but the story was all over the place, flashbacks and backstories weren't given much context that made the story confusing and made you feel like you were dropped into the middle of a story and not where it starts.
Making matters worse however was that towards the end of the book, the COVID pandemic hit causing the book to get delayed and sit in warehouses until not many people probably cared about it anymore, leading to the book getting the eventual axe ending at issue 18 and at its height selling 10,000 copies, but that wouldn’t be the end of the title as in 2024 Witchblade was rebooted, rebooting the universe and starting over with Sarah Pezzini and a new interpretation of her story and origin along with her cast of characters by Margueritte Bennett and Giuseppe Cafaro, the series having been a resounding success with sales figures estimated to be close to 80,000 copies and it’s still going strong today, having hit issue 25 with more planned.
So with all the history out of the way you might be wondering, Daniel why do you like Witchblade so much? And the answer I come to after giving it some thought is simple: it’s fun. While I think a major flaw volume 2 had was it took itself way too seriously, trying to go way too far from its roots, volume 1 and 3 were fun with over the top characters and fights, and while volume 1 has plenty of cringe inducing moments, volume 3 seems to have learned the lessons of its predecessors and found the right mix of over the top action without going to extreme while also providing a fun and compelling story. If Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns are a five star steak dinner, Witchblades is a fast food burger that you know is not good for you but man does it hit right. And you know what? That’s ok, sometimes we need something cheap and easy every once in a while to remind us why we love the other amazing things that are out there. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m gonna curl up with the latest issue of Witchblade and enjoy some reading.
