The Sandman Presents: Thessaly - Witch For Hire #4 - A Review

Written by: Bill Willingham
Penciled by: Shawn McManus
Inked by: Shawn McManus
Cover by: Tara McPherson
Colored by: Pamela Rambo
Lettered by: Phil Balsman
Editor: Mariah Huehner
Publisher: Vertigo Comics

I should honestly feel cheated. I don’t, but I should. The last issue’s final page promised “No More Talking Heads. It’s All Monsters From Here On Out.” Well, we don’t get much in the way of two-fisted, monster fighting action in this issue. Indeed, the big battle that the whole mini-series has been building towards is barely allotted a single page. And there are a LOT of talking heads.

Still, like with all the Fables whom Willingham writes about monthly, it is not the destination that matters. Only the journey along the way holds our interest. And in this, the final issue of Thessaly: Witch For Hire, Willingham concludes what has been one heck of a journey.

This mini-series was a sequel to Willingham’s first Thessaly story: The Thessaliad (available as part of “The Sandman Presents: Taller Tales” at fine comic shops everywhere) and has proven to be a worthy effort, as a sequel, an individual story and one more thing for us fans of Willingham’s work on Fables or The Sandman series in general to collect.

To quickly sum up the plot, Thessaly is an older than old witch, who still looks like a rather mousey college girl. She is being haunted by Fetch, a gestalt ghost made up of the spirits of every person Thessaly has ever killed. Fetch is, despite this, madly in love with Thessaly and winds up signing her up for an obligation: a mission to deal with several monsters. He does this in order to make her life more interesting and getting her out of the house.

Thessaly would be quite content to spend eternity reading and not doing anything at all interesting, but has a mean streak a mile wide concerning anyone who disrupts her life or tries to kill her. She deals with the various monsters only to find that the last one is a beast of pure chaos who is now dead set on killing her, all thanks to the manipulations of Fetch’s employer, who was the original target of the chaos beast (A Tharmic Null, by name) and was able to set the beast on Thessaly thanks to some superior magical legal maneuvering. That brings us to the start of this issue where everything thing gets settled, to no one’s satisfaction but the readers.

(Yes, that WAS the quick version!)

Art fans will have nothing to complain. McManus, another alumni of The Sandman, does some great work here managing the neat trick of making Thessaly look innocent and mousy and yet very powerful when appropriate. The various monsters and ghoulies are illustrated appropriately in a style that manages to maintain the book’s sense of humor, even when dealing with concepts such as a woman being eaten by her suddenly feral house cats.

The story is left wide open for yet another sequel. Personally, I’d love to see a regular series based around Thessaly’s adventures but I suspect TPTB would be content to leave Lucifer as the only Sandman spin-off seeing regular publication. Regardless, this book is a treat be you Sandman fan, Willingham enthusiast or just a lover of a good ripping yarn.

The Sandman Presents: Thessaly - Witch For Hire #3 - A Review

Written by: Bill Willingham
Penciled by: Shawn McManus
Inked by: Shawn McManus
Cover by: Tara McPherson
Colored by: Pamela Rambo
Lettered by: Phil Balsman
Editor: Mariah Huehner
Publisher: Vertigo Comics

There is quite a lot to attract one to this title. The most obvious is that this is one of an all too-few limited series based around the characters from Neil Gaiman’s classic “The Sandman” series. Another feature is that the story is by Bill Willingham; for my money, one of the best new writers to hit it big in recent memory. Author of numerous other Vertigo limited series (including a fair number of Sandman stories), Willingham recently hit it big with his own series, Fables. And for those of us who don’t care much for a good story, the artwork is done by the amazing Shawn McManus; another alumni of the Vertigo/Sandman school.

If you haven’t had the good fortune to be exposed to Thessaly either in “The Sandman” or in Willingham’s original mini-series “The Thessaliad”, which “Witch For Hire” is a sequel too, then this book holds very little for you. This is a talking head’s issue that exists purely to advance the plot. Thankfully, with Willingham’s gift for dialogue this fails to be as tedious as it might be with a lesser wordsmith.

At any rate, Thessaly is a witch. One of the famed witches of Thessaly from the Greek Mythology in fact, and if you don’t know anything about the myths regarding the Thessalian witches, all you need to know is that being turned into a pig or a donkey was the least of your worries. Thessaly is the oldest of her kind, and indeed, this issue reveals that she is older even than the days of Ancient Greece.

Due to some problems caused by an annoying ghost (i.e. Fetch, a gestalt of every person ever killed by Thessaly in her long life), Thessaly has wound up being signed up to kill or capture a number of highly dangerous monsters. With Fetch trapped in a magic mirror, Thessaly set out to fulfill this unwanted obligation, only to find that by signing onto this contract, she has made herself the target of one of the few things able to kill her; a Tharmic Null.

A Tharmic Null, this issue informs us, is a beast made of pure chaos that is occasionally made when something very evil is done in order to remove the evil along with everything else in the immediate area. The rest of this issue shows us Thessaly’s journeys as she travels around the universe searching for the knowledge of how to kill such a thing. A journey that, we find out, was all for nothing as she was unable to find her answers anywhere, despite consulting numerous oracles and books of magic, a giant cat who has killed one of everything in the universe that can die and even the Library of the Dream Realms where we get a quick cameo of Lucien and Merv from “The Sandman”.

This is all a great treat for the Sandman fans but not very conductive to anyone who missed the first two issues or who isn’t, for some reason., a fan of “The Sandman”. But for those of us who are, Willingham does Gaiman’s creations proud and I cannot wait to see the conclusion. Which, it might be noted, we are promised on the final page: “No More Talking Heads. It’s All Monsters From Here On Out.”

The Sandman Presents: Bast #2: Review

So far, this series hasn’t really done much to grab my attention… and that’s pretty bad coming from someone who cites Neil Gaiman as one of his biggest philosophical influences.

It isn’t that the ideas and scope are not as grand and gigantic as when Gaiman addressed them years ago. They are. It is not that the story doesn’t involve magic realms, gods and wonders a plenty. All that is here. What is not here are characters we care about.

Fans of The Sandman are familiar with the conceit that gods use belief as nourishment and that gods who are not regularly worshipped begin to lose form and power. Such is the case with Bast, the ancient Egyptian goddess of cats who is too stubborn to fade into nothingness and is looking for a way to restore the good old days when cats were revered by Man and she with them. She is going about this, through means that were unclear in the first issue and are not much clearer at the end of this, through a troubled young woman named Lucy.

Lucy is probably the most sympathetic character in the story, being smart and sensitive and trapped in a small town full of moronic, drunken religious fanatics. (Well, I sympathize with that. I do live in Texas, after all.) Sadly Lucy dies at the end of the first issue and most of the interest in the story died for me as well. While the “troubled teenage girl” is hardly a new character in comics, the idea of a troubled person turning to another religion (much less cat-worship) IS something that is rarely explored in the comics medium.

With Lucy dead, all we are left with is the concerned best friend, the drunken and abusive father, the enigmatic Lady Bast and the ghost of the kitten Lucy’s father killed in a moment of highly uncredible melodrama to act out the action. And nothing of note concerning the plot occurs until the last three pages, the brunt of this middle chapter being devoted to Bast’s telling of how things used to be in the days of Egypt and why she wants it back the way it was.

The artwork is fine but doesn’t leap off the page. At times, it does not seem to fit the story. It is hard to say what the age of Lucy and her friend are, with their looking like they are in their mid-teens but making references to 7^th graders being a threat. And at one point the ghost kitten asks Bast what is happening to her face when there is nothing obviously wrong with her face in the artwork.

I’ll probably pick up Bast #3 to keep the set together and see how it ends, but this is a far cry from The Sandman books from which it was inspired. It is even a far cry from more recent The Sandman Presents mini-series like The Thessailiad and Dead Boy Detectives.