Witchblade #1 Review
Medium: Comic
Release date: 2/9/1996
Review date: 9/23/2024
Score: 4/10
She has a Reservoir Dogs poster, really?
You (me) look at a comic like “Witchblade,” a series with hundreds of issues, that has a spinoff comic series that also has hundreds of issues, and even had a two season live action television show from 2001, and so you (me) decide that this series must be, at the very least, alright judging from the sheer volume of “Witchblade” related content that exists, so you (me) decide to start reading from the very beginning of the entire Witchblade saga at “Witchblade” Issue #1, and this, this is all you (me) get? This is the genesis of all of that?
“Witchblade” #1 is so by the numbers, it’s mind numbing. The main character Sara is an impossibly hot cop who is impossibly good at shooting people while wearing impossibly proportioned dresses - she's copaganda made flesh, parroting back almost every police cliché about “cops being the only ones to protect innocent people from the scum of the Earth,” all while meeting characters that are walking embodiments of every police officer stereotype ever penned, like the overprotective captain who thinks he's Sara’s dad, the obviously evil Internal Affairs officer, and the rookie partner who has a crush on Sara because she's just so dang hot. After shooting a bunch of guys in a drug den (but don't worry, they orphaned a girl Sara knows so their deaths are totally cool) and facing no discipline from her boss because ultimately she got that bad guys (and that’s all that really matters when your comic is written for an audience exclusively made up of 13 year old boys and “Thin Blue Line” cranks), Sara and her partner get wind of some sort of mystical mob tryout event going down at some theater, which Sara breaks into and discovers this magical gauntlet that the super rich super villain running everything is having everyone try on for the tryout, but then oh no! Her partner snuck in after Sara and got caught and then shot and then the magic gauntlet (the titular Witchblade) jumps on her arm and then Sara kills everybody in the theater while the super villain and his “Steven Segal roleplaying as an bad guy in Robin Hood while wearing an outfit I really only feel comfortable describing as Oriental as problematic as that is” henchman escape. The primary purpose of this issue seems to have been "how many different cheesecake poses can we get Sara into," which may have been enough to sell a comic in the 90s, but is rather boring and embarrassing in 2024.