Last week saw the release of the first issue of Marvel Comics’ latest monthly Scarlet Witch. The series is written by James Robinson with artwork by Vanesa Del Rey with colors by Jordie Bellaire. Award winning Hawkeye cover artist David Aja provides the cover to the first issue, plus variant covers are available from Kevin Wada, Bill Sienkiewicz, Erica Henderson, Tom Raney, and Chris Sotomayor. It’s not only David Aja’s cover, but Robinson’s well-paced introduction and Del Rey and Bellaire’s visuals that remind us of Matt Fraction and Aja’s successful Hawkeye series, another series about a secondary character and a life outside the scope of saving the world with the Avengers.
The new Scarlet Witch has a ghostly quality, and a style similar to DC Comics’s initial New 52 stories of Batwoman from J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman. It’s introspective look at a superheroine with a past also echoes Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto’s brilliant Black Widow series.
But this is a distinctly different story about a much different character. She is not a young heroine. She is a witch who speaks aloud with the ghost of Agatha, a dead woman she may or may not have killed in her past. Scarlet Witch–Wanda Maximoff–is a detective of sorts in the same way as Liv Moore uses her supernatural skills to solve crimes in iZombie.
. The OGN is for “oversized graphic novel” but the value in this book is the restoration, George Lucas style, of Howard Chaykin’s original artwork via a replacement of Marie Severin’s original 1970s colors with Chris Sotomayor’s update of the six-issue movie adaptation into a more modern color scheme. Adi Granov supplies the new cover art for this edition. Marvel said it will soon release similar editions of its adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Check out a preview of the new look at a classic movie adaptation below.
