Witchblade #181

Let's get a bit of history out of the way here first. "Darkness Falls" was supposed to be the concluding arc of writer David Hine's run on The Darkness, to be published in the fall of 2013, but ultimately it never happened. "Darkness Falls" would have begun in The Darkness #117, but the series was cancelled at #116. "Darkness Falls" was still always "coming down the pipeline", as a mini-series or OGN, but there was never any conclusive news on it.

Meanwhile, the rest of Top Cow's universe had to move on. Jackie played a big part in Witchblade's mythology, and his death would need to be immediately acknowledged in this series. They couldn't delay Witchblade indefinitely until "Darkness Falls" came out, so ultimately writer Ron Marz had the series jump a couple years ahead so that Jackie's death was long in the past by Witchblade #170, published October 2013. We found out that Sara had a run-in with Jackie, she decapitated him, then moved on with her life. Top Cow had effectively killed one of their flagship characters off-panel.

Now in March 2015, around a year and a half since we found out that Sara had killed Jackie, we're finally seeing "Darkness Falls"... and boy is it underwhelming.

The most obvious problem is that this is a The Darkness story being published in a series other than The Darkness. Jackie was far from a series regular in Witchblade, and David Hines' storylines from his run on The Darkness hadn't been touched upon in this title before. Issue #180 was almost entirely spent getting Sara (and the readers) up to speed on plots from another series. Jackie himself doesn't even get to fully appear in the issue!

Now in issue #181, what should have been a big encounter between Sara and Jackie ends up feeling very small. If I may spoil the whole thing for you: Sara pins Jackie to the ground, he knocks her back, Jackie's enemy hands Sara a magic sword that has never been mentioned before, and Sara cuts Jackie's head off. That's it. That's the entire fight. The death of Jackie Estacado takes up maybe 1/10th of the pages in "Darkness Falls: The Death Of Jackie Estacado".

The creative team chosen for this was a mistake. The art is very substandard. Gabriel Rearte is a generally competent artist, but the sketchy, uninked art here looks very rushed and can get pretty ugly. I don't know why he was chosen, since he's never worked on Witchblade, The Darkness, or any other Top Cow series before. You'd think, given how much lead time they've had to put this story together, they could have gotten an artist with an actual connection to the characters/series to draw the thing. Heck, with over a year between Jackie's off-panel death in Witchblade #170 and now, I'm sure even slowpokes like Marc Silvestri or Dale Keown could have managed to finish up this two-parter in time.

As for the writer, I feel for David Hine because this is a story he's been trying to finish telling for a couple years now (and has probably had to rewrite multiple times by this point), but bringing in a guest writer who has never worked on Witchblade before does nothing but add to the feeling that this is a filler story. It's already poorly drawn and completely extemporaneous to the current Witchblade run, it would have been nice if it was written by someone who was at least familiar with Sara Pezzini. Maybe get Marz to co-write, or dig up David Wohl from wherever he's been hiding and get him to write the story of one character he co-created killing another character he co-created. Just put some people on this story to make it feel like the big deal it should be.

After I finished reading this story, I was left pondering the worst question that a story could leave a reader asking: "Did they really need to tell this?" It's been so long since this story was supposed to be told that the rest of the Top Cow universe had already moved past it. As I said, we already knew that Sara killed Jackie and we mostly knew how she did it. There were no surprises to be found here. If Top Cow had no plans to go all out with "Darkness Falls" and really make it feel like an event, then why bother telling it? Dialogue and maybe a quick flashback could have gotten the entire story across in one of Marz's regular Witchblade issues.

So my verdict: was it awful and unreadable and insulting to the fans? Eeeeeh, no. "Darkness Falls" ended up being pretty bland and disappointing, but it is not bad enough to fuel rage. If you're a fan of Jackie Estacado, you might as well read it, but don't go in expecting too much.

1.5 stars out of 5.