Released in late-2023, Witch Trial is set mostly in 1857, 9 years after Ortensia Thomas died (and six years before Ortensia meets Alexander), only to live again. She's been traveling with Sarah Bishop, a witch that happened to find her in the woods, ever since. Learning how to deal with supernatural threats, but growing tired of a life of constant killing and death and weird magic rituals involving her horse (which Ortensia named "Horse"). And so, when a charming (and older) man named Jamie Corson shows up, treating her like a lady and buying her dresses, Ortensia starts to wonder if maybe she can have a different life.
As it turns out, Corson is nothing so benign as your run-of-the-mill creep, any more than it was coincidence Sarah found Ortensia to begin with. Ortensia learns some rough news about herself, as well as that people have been trying to manipulate her for years to what they think are best ends. Then she has to decide what to do with that knowledge.
I think it suffers a bit from the common issue of prequels, that we have some idea how things are going to turn out. Ortensia isn't going to die, or at least won't stay dead any more than she did last time. Neither is the Plague Doctor up there, since he appeared in issue 3 of the first mini-series. But the first mini-series left enough things unanswered that there's a fair amount of ground to cover, especially in regards to how Ortensia became the mostly-hardened badass she is by the 1860s. It's a situation where she has to grow up very fast, all at once, and learn to judge things for herself. She had mostly just followed Sarah's lessons, and then it wasn't clear how much she really liked frilly white dresses, so much as Corson told her she looked good in them and should wear things like that. After, she won't take others' word on things, and tends to set the rules for how things will be (deciding not to kill Alexander, but on her terms, for example.)
Mapa's art isn't more realistic than Hahn's was, but is a little more detailed. Corson's true nature, as something very different from anything Ortensia and Alexander faced in the first mini-series, allows Mapa and Peacock to be a bit wilder with the designs. Corson sometimes just looks like a bright, jagged outline or crackling blue-white, with teeth and eyes that hint at a face, but don't remain in one place. Peacock's color work is more of a gradation than Ryan Cody's was. Lots of shading and gradually shifting to black rather than sharp delineations as the lines as Ortensia thought she understood them in her life begin to blur and smear. That they become rigid once more by the time she meets Alexander I guess means she's settled on a new definition of right and wrong when she decided to seize her own destiny.
There was an ad on the back cover of the last issue promising at least one more mini-series. But given the way Scout Comics has fallen apart - and especially given that Southard was pretty outspoken in the ways Scout didn't honor their contracts - I doubt it'll ever see the light of day, unless at another publisher.
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