Ravina The Witch?

Title: Ravina The Witch?
Artist: Junko Mizuno (水野 純子)
Translators: C.B. Cebulski, Patrick Macias, and Jason Thompson
Publication Year: 2014 (France); 2017 (United States)
Publisher: Titan Comics
Pages: 48

This guest review is written by Erica Friedman (@OkazuYuri on Twitter).

Imagine if you will, an image of two goats looking at each other. Maybe a younger animal looking up at an older one.

“The younger, cuter one is looking up at the older and wiser one,” your brain immediately fills in for you. You then tell yourself a story about how the older goat is teaching the younger one, or scolding it, or… And in the end, you have created meaning in what is a picture of two animals who are literally just looking at one another for one brief moment.

Ravina is a girl who lives in a garbage heap, raised by crows. She is given a magic wand by a dying old woman. Ravina is captured and brought to the palace of a corrupt king, whom she unmasks as a cheater. She then lives briefly with an older man who wears dresses, and while she stays with him she learns that to use the wand she must be drunk. Ultimately, Ravina is saved from angry villagers by her crow family and returned to her home in the garbage dump.

Ravina The Witch? by Junko Mizuno is the fairytale equivalent of two animals looking at one another. We can be moved deeply by the story and we can find all sorts of meaning in it – whether it is truly there or not. In fact, we’re going to make damn well sure it is by telling ourselves the moral of the story. There is a single moment when Ravina explicitly accepts the man who wears dresses, telling him that if it makes him happy, that’s fine by her. Other than that moment, whether you see Ravina The Witch? as profound tale of acceptance of life’s vagaries or two goats looking at one another, is entirely up to you.

Titan Comics has done a bang-up job with this book. The color palette consists of muted pukey pastels, reminiscent of barfed up blueberry yogurt – entirely suitable for a fairytale that begins and ends in a garbage heap. The cover is highlighted with gold metallic ink, and Mizuno’s illustrations are detailed, intricate, and often framed in black. The combination of these visual elements imbues the book with an atmosphere similar to that of a Russian fairy tale. And, like Russian fairy tales, this story is filled with creatures that are simultaneously cute and disgusting, a lot of drinking, and the kind of ambiguous ending that one expects from Mizuno’s work.

Readers may identify this story as a deconstructed “magical girl” series. Ravina’s magic comes from her wand, but she needs to summon a special power to activate it, and she needs to be drunk to do so. So is she a “witch,” or is she a “heroine”? Or is she a kind of Vasalisa, willing to take risks to achieve morally opaque goals and personal power? You’ll have to decide for yourself, because Mizuno isn’t going to help you with this at all. You may have to re-read the book and then tell yourself another story or two to figure it out.

Ravina The Witch? is an awesome must-get book if you’re a fan of Mizuno’s work or enjoy alternative and deconstructed fairy tales. It will also make a great gift to determine who your real friends are.

Erica Friedman (@OkazuYuri on Twitter) holds a Masters Degree in Library Science and a B.A. in Comparative Literature, and is a full-time researcher for a Fortune 100 company. She has lectured at dozens of conventions and presented at film festivals, notably the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Erica has written about queer comics for the Japanese literary journal Eureka, Animerica magazine, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and she has contributed to numerous online magazines such as Forbes, Slate, and Huffington Post. She has written news and reviews of Yuri anime, manga, and related media on her blog Okazu since 2002.