Another frustrated chase after the Cat takes the Seeker to the middle of the war between her sisters, who kill her. The End…or is it? Find out in Inkblot #12 from Image Comics!
INKBLOT #12
Writer: Rusty Gladd and Emma Kubert
Artist: Rusty Gladd and Emma Kubert
Publisher: Image Comics
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: September 1, 2021
Previously in Inkblot: The Seeker accidentally summoned a mysterious Cat, who may actually be a living piece of the Void. It travels through time and space, innocently wreaking havoc along the way. It travels to Earth during the Ice Age at a time when the Seeker’s family are there, ten children and young people who have just lost their parents. A snow monster interrupts them, and Xenthos orders the family into a cave. They all go – except for young Inos, who seeks the Cat and wanders after it. Xenthos saves the little boy from the monster by stabbing it with a stick – and taking its power for himself, the first time anyone in the family has done this.
FIRST FRUSTRATION, THEN A MOMENT TO PONDER
Inkblot #12 opens at the Living Castle in the Forestlands, where the Seeker is trying to lure the Cat with milk, hoping it will do something extraordinary. Void Creature or not, it is still a Cat, so it knocks a cup of milk off the edge of the table. When the Seeker shows her anger, the Cat runs, and she chases it. It opens a portal, and they leap through – straight into the Mountainlands where two of the Seeker’s sisters are at war. She lands right between Vironika and Vikka and gets hit by their crossfire.
She dies and opens her eyes to find herself in the Beyond, the land of the dead. Immediately she is discovered by other dead who had expected immortality and blame her for not having it. They start chasing her. She finds a building and the door opens up to let her in, then slams behind her. The man inside is her brother Vallathrax, who died. (By the way, the Cat is still with her.) The Seeker is still in some shock about being dead. Vallathrax reassures her that if she can find her body, she can just zip back in.
As the doors break open, Vallatrax tells her that this isn’t actually the afterlife. This is purgatory. Every spirit that ends up here is burdened by those they have taken for power. He has come to realize that they were all wrong in slaying monsters for their power. But the mob rushes in.
And the Cat takes them back to the Mountainlands and the Seeker falls back into her body. She has come to realize, in all of this, that there is still a lot she does not know. After a quick plunge through the known worlds, she ends up back at her library where she is summoned to see the King. Vallathrax is with her, but as a spirit that only she can see. And presumably the Cat, who is curled up in his arms.
FROM LIFE TO DEATH AND BACK AGAIN
The action gets bigger and bolder in Inkblot #12. The furious chase through the library is only the prelude. This time, when they reach the Mountainlands, everything is awash with color, mostly in the red portion of the spectrum, what with everything being on fire due to the war and magic and dragons and such. There is wonderful full-page panel, just before the Seeker is killed, where Vikka and Vironika face off. Vironika’s magic is blue, Vikka’s red. To balance them out, their sound effects are in the opposite color. Where everything meets in the middle, in other words, where the Seeker is, the brightness intensifies to almost pure white. It is bombastic and quite wonderful.
This also creates a solid contrast with the Beyond, the purgatory of this universe. This is an icy world, but it doesn’t have the liveliness of the Ice Age we saw last issue. This is a world tinted by the pale blue of death. I enjoyed that the Seeker, although ostensibly dead, is not taking this lying down. She is as irate as ever. The Cat looks at least moderately surprised, but it is a Cat, and it won’t look that way for long.
BOTTOM LINE: THE CAT DOES THINGS ITS OWN WAY
Any story that can travel back and forth through time, but in Inkblot #12 we see more connections with the one-shot chapters from earlier in the series. We’re also starting to see these immortal beings can still suffer consequences from their actions which keeps the story interesting.
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Inkblot #12
One Cat, and one civil war – this won’t end badly…
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Writing7
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By day, she’s a mild-mannered bureaucrat and Ms. Know-It-All. By night, she’s a dance teacher and RPG player (although admittedly not on the same nights). On the weekends, she may be found judging Magic, playing Guild Wars 2 (badly), or following other creative pursuits. Holy Lack of Copious Free Time, Batman! While she’s always wished she had teleportation as her superpower, she suspects that super-speed would be much more practical because then she’d have time to finish up those steampunk costumes she’s also working on.