What I Bought 1/29/2024 - Part 2

I was driving back from a work thing last week and saw a billboard encouraging people to try camel milk. The billboard assured me it was great for both me and my pets. Yes, that's just what I want, milk from an animal that almost certainly spit it in beforehand.

Midnight Western Theatre: Witch Trial #5, by Louis Southard (writer), Butch Mapa (artist), Sean Peacock (colorist), Buddy Beaudoin (letterer) - Now that's a look that'll get you morally questionable job offers!

Ortensia returns to the Plague Doctor to find him badly injured, which suits her fine. She's just there for her guns and knife, all of which she unloads on Corson once she gets to his mansion. I especially like her getting him in the eye with a knife while he's in the middle of calling her sweetheart.

Not that any of it does any good. Corson shrugs it all off and pulls the same stunt he did with Sarah in issue 2, creating an illusion of Ortensia as a child with her father. He's about to rip her soul out of her body when the red, multi-armed demon the dopes who killed Ortensia summoned by accident pops up. Ortensia is his (for unclear purposes), and he's Corson's boss, so this meddling is not OK.

It's fun to watch Corson's spectral hellhound form, which has been drawn as fierce and snarling up to this point, suddenly having drooping ears and a cringing stance. It's more fun when Corson's stripped of his powers and Ortensia literally beats him to death, even as Mapa draws her looking increasingly blank as the beating continues. Doesn't bring Sarah back, even if Ortensia is angry at her and the Plague Doctor for just trying to use her to their own ends.

As she points out, the Doc knew what was going to happen to her, and could have intervened. But he didn't, and neither did Sarah. They let Ortensia die, and now she's an angry young woman who may become the Angel of Death, whatever that means, but is certainly not going to care what they had planned for her.

I wasn't sure about a prequel mini-series, because I was less interested in how Ortensia became what she was, and more in what she and Alexander would get involved with as the 19th Century progressed. But this turned out well, seeing an intermediate stage for Ortensia, and I think the interior of the back cover is suggesting the next mini-series will jump back into Ortensia's future, whatever that may hold. Fingers crossed it comes out soon!