Open Mike Night - Spell on Wheels #1

Spell on Wheels #1

Written by: Kate Leth
Art by: Megan Levens
Colored by: Marissa Louise
Lettered by: Blambot’s Nate Piekos

Published by: Dark Horse
Cover Price:  $3.99

Spell on Wheels tells the story of three witches (Jolene, Claire, and Andy) in their mid twenties. While at work (they run a Tattoo and Tarot shop), one of Claire’s ex-boyfriends (Nathan) breaks into their house and steals several spells and magical artifacts.  Nathan motivated by revenge and jealousy...apparently Claire dumped him because he was mundane.  But he’s also being manipulated by a powerful and mysterious enemy.  In order to throw off the trail, Nathan starts to sell off several of the artifacts on line, and the girls decide to go on a road trip to recover them.

Mike Weaver: Can I just say first and foremost that tattoo and tarot seems like an awesome combination?  Anyway, within their job, it seems they work magic to do what they consider to be good deeds for their clientele outside of what they’re hired to do, in this case, making a guy be less of a jerk to his girlfriend when giving him a tattoo.  

I do like that the girls each have a unique voice, and defined roles within the group.  Jo is the team badass and also pretty much the de facto leader, Andy is a newbie just getting into the witchcraft thing, and Claire is the one with the most sensory power, plus very emotional, plus a legacy witch to some degree.  

I like the set-up, I like the idea of it being a giant chase story, and I really like the magic car they end up with, but I’m conflicted about the length.  This is going to be a five issue story.  I feel like I want to see more than five issues of this, and yet at the same time, I’m not sure that indy comics can really hit the ground expecting an unknown to be able to last more than five.  Hopefully more miniseries follow if this does well.

Maillaro: Yeah, I was a little surprised by that too.  It’s actually pretty common in indy books these days that everything launches as a mini-series.  Images does it all the time, with most series pretty certain they will continue past the mini-series.

But Spell on Wheels series does seem like it has a natural ending point (catching up to Nathan and “big mysterious evil”).  I agree that 5 issues is nowhere near enough to tell this story and still have plenty of time to explore these characters on a wild magical road trip.  I expect you will see some heavy montaging throughout this series, which would almost feel like a disservice.  Hopefully the sales are good enough to justify continuing it, and they will announce it has been extended to an ongoing, or at least 12 issues.

Weaver: So, it’s five issues, with one down.  We know there’s got to be some tracking down of items to go, we know that Nathan’s stealth magic will fade leading to a confrontation, we know that eventually they’ll need to confront the big bad, we assume by the Spider-Man rule that at some point, the Compass that Claire still has will be taken by the big bad...there’s just a lot on the table listing out what we know will happen, or strongly suspect.  A confrontation with Nathan will also involve a lot of handwringing from Claire, and a big bad confrontation needs to be an issue in and of itself.  That’s a lot to bite off in four more issues, at least we know they won’t “waste” one with a fill-in type story, a la Afterlife with Archie.

I assume at some point, we get Claire’s parents too.

Another thing I wanted to just kind of softball toss out there: the diversity on the team.  You’ve got an Asian (name would suggest Vietnamese to me) girl, an African American girl, and a redheaded white girl.  When I first saw the cover, I thought that it might be a shoehorned in kind of diversity for the sake of diversity, but I was pretty impressed with how organic it felt.  There were no strong efforts to make us painfully aware of their ethnicities, they just were people.  I know that can kind of go both ways...there’s a balance between having real inclusion rather than just a palette swap, and then on the other end constantly making mention of your ancestry like 80’s era X-Men, and I think this hit exactly the right middle ground.

Maillaro: It is always a risk when us two while, straight, men start talking about diversity, but yeah, I thought it was done really well here.  Each of the main characters felt unique and well-conceived, with their racial identity and being female being part of who they are, not their defining characteristic.  There was a real diversity in voice here, not just slapping a paint job on characters and calling it diversity. Huge credit for Kate Leth for being able to make that balance really work.

I also like that Spell on Wheels seems to treat magic as “no big deal.”  There is a magic users’ “secret Ebay” and Jolene, Claire, and Andy all seem to practice their craft publicly.  I thought that worked well to make it feel more natural, not setting it in a total fantasy world.

Weaver: There’s some conjecture about the practicing publicly...I just want to say, you can find a billion tarot readers that have no real magical ability, and probably at least one tarot and tattoo shop like that, so we don’t know if the world at large know that magic is a thing or not.  However, I did like that the comic never felt the need to overexplain magic.  It’s here, it is what it is, let’s move on.  It felt like we got exactly enough Cliff Notes to get us to where we needed to be.

Maillaro: Yeah, that is pretty much what I was trying to get at.  Image tried to do something similar in Black Magick a few months back, and it felt far heavier handed, and that took away from the book some.  Sometimes it’s better to just set things up and let the reader’s suspension of disbelief kick in to take care of the rest.

So, scores?

Weaver: So, for scores, the art wasn’t phenomenal, yet always serviceable.  I’ll call that a 3.5.  The writing, however, was top notch in my opinion.  I’m giving that a solid 5.

Maillaro: Yeah, writing is definitely a 5.  I had nothing I could possibly complain about there.   Art was solid, but not all that exciting.   The characters all had distinctive looks, and I loved the bad ass magical car.  But not enough to go higher than a 4...

Maillaro: So for next week, got a few options on the table.  Teen Titans #1 picks up after Rebirth, so we may want to revisit that.  Prowler has his own series launching...but it is part of Clone Conspiracy, so that may be a tricky one.   And Doctor Strange gets his own team book “Doctor Strange And The Sorcerers Supreme” just in time for his movie.  We could also check out Jughead, which took a huge turn in quality when the new creative team took over last issue.