Webcomic Wednesday: The Offering Part One and Part Two by Anna Bongiovanni
Perhaps it should go without saying when we’re talking about fiction in visual media, but the act of seeing is, in fact, an action. Deceptively so, since all you’re doing is standing there with your eyes open and letting them do what they do all the time, but what the eyes take in can heal or devastate. As such, an image of oner character seeing another can be deployed in a story with sufficient climactic power to rival any kiss or murder. That’s certainly the case in The Offering, a short comic about witchcraft that cartoonist Anna Bongiovanni has posted in two parts (that’s part one above) on her tumblr. Drawn in a playful style belied by the dark material, the tale concerns two sisters, older Christina and young Mary, and the coven of witches among which Christina hopes to belong. Friendly, devout, nude, and unashamed, the witches are conducting a ritual to raise a demonic child to life; eager to prove herself, Christina volunteers for a solemn duty. Mary’s rebellion against that duty’s sad result leads her outside the circle to an older, seemingly more powerful witch, whose advances Mary endures in order to acquire the spell that can restore her bond to her older sister. But witches have a way of twisting things, and the end result is very different from what Mary expected. Bongiovanni leaves us with a final image of Mary, now transformed by her experience, staring at the body of someone very close to her. That gaze contains the realization that everything has changed: the past is lost to her, and with it both the sister and the self she once knew.