What I Bought 12/20/2019 - Part 1

Nothing like 60 degree weather two days before Christmas. Entirely normal! Although my dad's ecstatic. He said over the weekend he'd like a solid six months of this. Sounds a little boring to me. besides, if the ground hadn't been wet from last week's 6+ inches of snow, excavating the pipe that runs to his sewage lagoon would have been a real pain.

Sera and the Royal Stars #5, by Jon Tsuei (writer), Audrey Mok (artist), Raul Angulo (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Nothing much, just a blue skinned lion man with a lightning sword.

Regulus emerges and tries to take control of Sera to fight the dragon person chasing them. It doesn't go very well, as Sera and Regulus seem to be in dispute about who is running the show. The rest of the Stars are trying to reach a bridge in the realm of the dead where Sera can pull them back into the realm of the living. They're having their own problems with the other of the two dragons, plus some giant swamp deity thing, that really wants Sera's soul. Or just hates all the Stars, because they attack both sides.

Our heroes escape, but there's a lot of disagreement. Regulus wants Sera to leave her physical body behind, because it limits his power. Sera wants to return and rescue her family from her uncle, while the Stars insist she help them. Which is really the issue here. At no point did Sera want to be involved in this. Mithra forcibly placed Regulus inside her, basically threatened with visions of doom if Sera didn't help. As a result, Sera wasn't there when her family's kingdom fell, and her brother died. The Stars basically poo-poo that, a necessary sacrifice for a greater cause. Yeah, saving their asses. That's allegedly going to help humanity somehow, but that could be a lie. Deities have been known to lie for their own benefit, just like humans. And what does it even mean that time isn't going to flow properly if the Stars aren't awakened?

No, that's actually something I'm curious about, because I'm not at all clear what will happen in concrete terms if Sera doesn't succeed. It can't be anything too terrible, because her mother was supposed to complete the quest, failed, and yet, life continues.

I don't know what the deal is with that one river deity or whatever it is, but I like Mok's design for it. The stringy seaweed hair, the patches of moss or barnacles growing here and there. Brackish water seems to drip from it constantly, like a waterlogged sponge. The character designs for this series have been great. The fight scenes were brief, but we see a little bit of what each of the Stars can do, how their abilities and skill sets differ.

Now the book is on a break until February, and we'll see where things go from there.

Steeple #4, by John Allison (writer/artist), Sarah Stern (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - I ended up with the variant cover, which makes Witchfest look like either a street carnival, or a cosplay convention.

Billie foolishly agrees to volunteer for Witchfest. She even signed in blood, which is just damn foolish. Billie ends up enjoying herself, as this apparently lets her reconnect with her ill-spent youth. I'm assuming she and Maggie may have gotten freaky during some big midnight thing that was going on. Although "Walk of Shame" could have a different connotation for a curate in the Anglican Church. Reverend Penrose has a bad night, as he's captured by a witch who. . . steals his pants. This leaves him feeling rather embarrassed, so he takes a sabbatical, confident Billie can handle things with her community involvement. And Mrs. Clovis may have enlisted a witch to resurrect her nice vacuum cleaner. Well, Billie knows how to break vacuums, so there's nothing to worry about.

The part where all the witches are swapping legends about Penrose is pretty funny. Especially the panel where it looks like he strolled in direct from a cover shoot for some bodice ripper romance novel. Still wearing his white collar, natch. Billie's repeated frustration as people accuse of her off being a temptress or whatever. Well Billie, you don't act much like people expect a woman of the cloth to behave.

There's one issue left, and I have no idea what's going to happen. Part of me thinks there'll be a need for punching, and Penrose will have to step in, but I could see him not bothering to come back. Or he comes back because Billie switched teams to Satanism and he has to train Maggie as a new curate. Everyone keeps suggesting she's just trying to convince herself and everyone else she's wicked, which leaves me wondering why. Maybe we'll find out something about that. Or maybe not.