
Welcome to the first installment of Season of the Witchblade! This a new series of articles I'm writing that was born out of a couple of things. First and foremost, our Required Reading segment that we did during the All-New Secret Identity shows was focused on learning more about comic characters we were unfamilliar with. Secondly, as I transition from print to digital comics, I am going back through comics I've collected in the past and re-reading them, filling in holes in my collection, etc.
While filing some comics away last week, I stumbled across a couple of issues of Witchblade: Takeru, a manga series involving a japanese teen who comes into posession of the Witchblade. The series was published in the US by Top Cow a few years ago. Seeing those issues got me to thinking about Witchblade, and how very little I knew about the American series. The more I thought about it, the more interested I became in delving into this series, as it seems somewhat underrated given how long it's been around. Witchblade has run for over 150 issues, it's been adapted into a live-action TV series, and it's inspired both manga and anime series of the same name. How many other comic series can say that?
My blueprint for this project is to read a bit about the early days, go through some of Ron Marz's recent run, and then catch up to the current storyline Seeley is writing. There are a ton of back issues available through Drive Thru, so I will be taking a look at some of them, and reviewing them both on the SI site and Drive Thru as I go along.
So, that's the setup for this series of articles that I'll be writing about Witchblade. In a couple of days I'll be back with a look at Witchbalde Origins: Volume One, a trade that features the first eight issues of the series.
In the meantime, I'd love to hear from any of you readers and listeners about your history with this series!