376 pgs. color | $34.99 paperback | W & A : Sole Otero
It was a dark and stormy night in 1768 when a ship bearing passengers, including three mysterious cloaked figures and a goat, arrive at Buenos Aires (then known as Buen Ayre). The other passengers are already suspicious of them, then the child of one of the passengers disappears and is seen with them…
Cut to the present day and two guys shooting the breeze. One tells a strange story about oversexed neighbors that leads to him witnessing some kind of witchy sexy ritual involving two women, a bunch of men, and a goat. Then he’s part of the ritual, and finds himself first with priapism, then erectile dysfunction, and going on strange journeys in the middle of the night of which he remembers nothing in the morning.
Cut back in time to three women now introduced as María Fátima, María Lourdes, and María Mercedes (for the uninitiated, all three names have strong Catholic association, the first two to pilgrimage sites and the third as one of the names of the Virgin Mary). They’re hiring a local maid named Ailin and warn her that they are very touchy about their privacy. After being shown to her quarters, the maid reveals that she snuck her baby in with her. A goat enters the building and is entirely too interested in the baby, so she scares him off, exclaiming Walicho! which means “witchcraft” in her native language of Mapudungun (used by the Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina).
Things get stranger from there, and finally one of the sisters tells Ailin that “Religion is a force that destroys everything it touches—and what it cannot destroy, it consumes” and “Unlike them, we are not here to conquer. We came to live in harmony with the place.” Then they rescue a woman from a would-be rapist, by which point I was totally onboard with the María sisters, no matter what they were actually up to. If you are too, then this is definitely a book you’ll want to check out. Witchcraft continues to jump back and forth in time, but the unifying element is the María sisters, who live on the fringes of their society but act as an important counterbalance against the forces of misogyny and suspicion of female pleasure.
The narrative pace of Witchcraft is breathless and Otero’s exuberant art catches the spirit of the storyline perfectly. There are consistencies in her work, particularly a taste for drawing blobby characters and the expressive use of relative size, but what really stands out in this volume is the variety of layouts, color schemes, and artistic styles she uses. Like the story, it’s a wild ride but one that hangs together thanks to the consistent vision of the artist and the forward momentum she generates.
Sole Otero is a comic artist, illustrator, and textile designer who is a native of Argentina but now lives in France. Her previous works include Poncho Fue, Intensa, and Naftalina (also published in English as Mothballs); the latter book won the Fnac-Salamandra Graphic Novel Award in 2019 and the Audience Award from the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2023. You can read an interview with her here. | Sarah Boslaugh
You can see a sample of the artwork for Witchcraft on the Fantagraphics web site. This work originally published in 2023 in Spanish as Walicho and is presented here in an English translation by Andrea Rosenberg.
