After guiding the title through nearly a decade of stories and then taking a little less than two years off, veteran comics writer Ron Marz will return to Top Cow’s Witchblade with October’s #170, taking over the reins from departing writer Tim Seeley.Seeley, of course, took over from Marz when, at the end of the first major arc in Artifacts, the Top Cow Universe underwent a soft reboot and Marz left Witchblade to work on Artifacts full time (it had originally been planned as a 12-issue event series). The move was part of a line-wide initiative to shake things up at Top Cow, with new writers and artists jumping on nearly every title.”Plugging back in has been incredibly easy,” Marz told CBR. “Sara is an old friend, and it’s nice to be seeing her again, regularly. I think the big difference is that when I first came to Witchblade, I was coming to it with a blank slate. I’d honestly never read the title very much, so I didn’t have any pre-conceived notions about it. This time, I’m obviously very familiar with it. I’m following up Tim Seeley’s run, which was different from mine and put Sara in literally a different place, which I thought was great fun. Any creator should bring their own take to a book, rather than just treading water, and Tim and Diego Bernard did that. I’m coming into this intending to do something different from what Tim and Diego did, and something different than I did during my first run on Witchblade.”Seeley, best known for work with his creator-owned title Hack/Slash, took over the title and has guided it through the last year and a half or so, but his new property Revival has presumably been taking more of his time, since it’s been a hot seller at Image and there’s been constant interest form Hollywood. He and Revival artist Mike Norton also recently signed on to bring their book The Occultist back at Dark Horse.Last year’s Free Comic Book Day offering from Top Cow was taken from Seeley’s Witchblade run, and when we spoke about him at the time, he seemed pretty excited.”No matter what I do, part of me is occasionally always going to stop and realize ‘Holy S–t. I’m writing WITCHBLADE,’” Seeley told us. “But, I think it’s important to balance the affection and ‘fannishness’ with making sure I approach each issues as a problem to solve.I have to think ‘How do I make this the most entertaining Witchblade tale possible for the money the reader is paying.”
