Marguerite Bennett

I loved this! It's a wild ride that I wasn't sure at first what I was getting into, but the more I read, the more I fell headfirst into this amazing and awful world that Bennett created. It is obvious that this was a story born out of anger: of how womanhood is denigrated, how women are treated as objects and bearers of blame and shame, and how we are placed onto pedestals of meekness and obedience, or made monsters if we exhibit brains and a spine.

Victorian body horror is not my usual genre show more by a long-shot, but I'm glad I gave it a shot. The gore and brutality also appeared side-by-side with love and sensuality. It's a celebration of women, of feminine power in all its form, of taking our place in a man's world and asserting our power.

The fact that the central two characters, Mariah and Lady, subverted all sorts of Victorian sensibilities by existing was amazing. They were a same-sex interracial couple from very different classes and they didn't give a damn about society. That they turned into avenging bug creatures was just icing on the cake.

This book is gruesome and awful, sexy and sweet, and cathartic. So cathartic. I hope there's more to come. show less

The Pussycats get “arrested” for plagiarism by Alexandra's twin Alexander, but he was just trying to get his sister's attention. They skip a fancy awards ceremony to play at a charity concert in the park. They invite teen band The Archies (Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie, and Jughead) to open for them at an arena show in Tokyo, only to have the teens get kidnapped by all the villains from the Pussycats’ past. They are rescued, of course, with the help of all the friends from the show more Pussycats' past.

Absolutely hilarious, just like the volume before it. It is a little weird to think of Archie and friends as being significantly younger than the Pussycats? Melody keeps calling them “my teens” (as in, “Oh no, my teens have been kidnapped!”) which had me in stitches. What a great series. I would have loved to read these as individual issues, they have great pacing. I'm really disappointed the series is so short. show less

Witchblade: Volume One collects issues 1-6 and ½ of the revived series from Top Cow written by Marguerite Bennett with art by Giuseppe Cafaro and Ariela Kristantina, colors by Arif Prianto and Bryan Valenza, and letters by Troy Peteri. Though influenced by the previous Witchblade continuity, this new comic revamps and reintroduces the character for a new audience. Sara Pezzini still works for the NYPD, but this time she’s working through layers of double and triple identities in order to show more root out corruption and find the people responsible for her father’s murder. Writer Bennett deftly weaves the multi-layered story and Pezzini’s inner monologue as she questions power and bodily autonomy, particularly as a woman in the hyper-masculine worlds of the military and police as well as in a patriarchal society. The Witchblade’s ability to take control of her body for its own aims further adds a layer to her questions about identity and self-possession. Her reintroduction of the character keeps all the fantasy elements that made the comic a hit in the late ’90s and early 2000s while radically updating the story to appeal to a modern audience. The depth of narrative makes this particularly interesting and forecasts a Top Cow resurgence. show less

this series has been hyped up to me for nearly a decade: horror, insects, lesbians, gorgeous art style, so many people have said I'd love Insexts. I am disappointed to report that not only do i not love it, i don't even /like/ it. The covers are nice and there are some lovely individual panels, but stylistically I'm left underwhelmed. that's not even touching on how this is less the kind of horror I favor and more in the style of a hammer monster movie- popcorn rather than anything of real show more substance. the dialogue is painful, and not in a 'historical fiction' way, but in a poorly written harlequin kind of way. further, this series is less interested in doing cool body horror or symbolism, and faaaaar more enamoured with the fact that they can illustrate sex. that's fine, but when I'm all of 4 issues in and I've already read 4 separate sex scenes, I start to wonder if there's a point. Normally I read a volume like this all in one day no sweat, but this is so un-compelling that i've been dragging my heels for weeks now. I'm a little heart-broken, tbh.

Maybe if i'd read this in my early 20s when it first came out i'd have a different view, but as it stands there's a superior lesbian horror series with gorgeous art: Monstress. show less