Crossover fever has struck Top Cow. The first of these efforts crosses their latest, Battle of the Planets, with one of their mainstays, the Witchblade.
The good: Nice art.
The bad: Lame, out-of-character dialogue, no story surprises.
The art: Nice work by Christina and Jo Chen. Their style brings the Battle tale into a more modern anime style with nice detail. Check out the back of the book for some of the pre-colored work, which is a real treat. If I have any complaint, it would be that the color sometimes muddies up the compositions and swallows a lot of luxurious detail. I also found some of Zoltar's word balloons, done with red lettering over purple, hard to read.
The story: Told from an outside character's point of view in the framework of a fairy tale, the story features how Princess infiltrates a Spectran mining camp, is captured by Spectrans and in the effort to break the miners free, is forced to be possessed by the Witchblade. Multiple "ass-kickings" and tremendous explosions and lots of writhing tentacles fill the next few pages until the rest of G-Force comes to the rescue. Princess attacks them until Mark gives her the strength to force back the Witchblade's will. Now discarded, the Witchblade is inherited by the storyteller.
No surprises here. I could have recounted the entire story without picking up the book, simply based on the traditional formula for any character encountering any self-aware mystical object looking for a host body. It's a safe formula, requiring no brain power on the part of either writer or reader. Good for fans of eye candy.
Munier Sharrieff once again demonstrates his difficulty in understanding character voices--some of the lines clash with the characters speaking them. Princess sounds like a teenage male nerd on some pages: "...But as much as I'd love to chat about matriarchal ass kickers, I've got some lives to save." Now as a warrior who fights "like a Lucavian fire iron," Princess is no stranger to snappy heroic repartee, but, "Matriarchal ass kickers?" Yuck. The 8-year-old girl character spouts off bad melodramatic metaphors like a movie mystic, not the pure innocent she's supposed to be. It's hard to enjoy eye candy when your eyes are rolling in your head.
On the other hand, the rest of the team, for as briefly as they appeared, seemed fairly represented.
The bottom line: Shut off your brain and watch the pretty pictures, and you'll have a pretty good time.
