Sole Otero’s second release from Fantagraphics is, in a word, astonishing. Her puzzle box of a tale centers on a trio of immortal witches without ever really focusing directly on them. Instead, she doles out clues in the form of standalone short stories, jumping through time and unrelated character perspectives to craft a mesmerizing mystery about their origins and objectives.
Buy WitchcraftThe story kicks off in Buenos Aires in 1768, with the trio of wealthy but untitled ladies arriving from Europe with their goat after creeping out the ship’s crew with their seemingly degenerate behavior. Suddenly, Otero jumps to the present, following a couple of average men as they hang out at a cafe and candidly discuss the loud, incessant sexual activities of one man’s next-door neighbors. When he reveals that the oversexed man has ties to mysterious ladies rumored to own most of the town, we get our first tantalizing inkling of Otero’s innovative plot intentions.
From there, Otero circles through fascinating independent stories involving a young woman’s crippling agorophobia in the internet age, a schoolyard love triangle, an 18th-century indigenous girl called into domestic service at the witches’ estate, a 20th-century young girl adopted into the home after sexual abuse at her Catholic orphanage, and a modern young man intent on confronting the witches in order to free his girlfriend, one of the coven’s daughters.
There’s so much going on here, and doled out in such a sprawling, 376-page tome, that one read seems inadequate to truly grasp its complexities. Otero has crafted something truly special, utilizing disparate character voices and eras to paint a picture of female empowerment, colonialism, and religious hypocrisy. She accomplishes this without primarily using the witches as a supernatural hook, preferring to keep them as shadowy spectres looming in the background of the myriad mortals circling their orbit. She also remains objective about the witches, briefly portraying their horrifying blood/sex/magic rituals but also their positive contributions to the community, with the trio acting as foster mothers to multiple children even as they exploit men to achieve their goals.
Readers will likely gravitate to certain stories, with my favorite being the agoraphobia story about a shut-in lady who develops an internet relationship with a young man who delivers her groceries. The nature of her condition results in the bulk of their interactions occurring via email, with Otero displaying the full text of those deeply confessional email communications, even as they reveal the man’s erratic mood swings brought about by his connection to the witches. Otero skillfully deals with cyberstalking and loneliness in the internet age, all framed against the overarching witchcraft theme.
Otero alters her artwork style as dictated by the nature of the individual stories, most noticeably in the schoolyard romance relayed via one girl’s diary entries, complete with childish drawings colored only in red and text on ruled lines. For the most part in other stories, she maintains a loose, flowing line focused on character shapes rather than expressive faces or background details. Even page layouts vary from tale to tale, with the agoraphobia portion largely confined to small, strict squares to mirror the character’s confinement, and all stories set in the past rendered in surrounding page frames with rounded corners, evoking old photographs. Colors are fairly muted throughout, with a palette largely limited to shades of blues and reds, although deployed in startlingly unique applications like the fuchsia skintones of the cafe bros. It’s a heady witches’ brew of artistic experimentation, further beguiling readers into Otero’s wild world.
