Tomoe, Shiseiji, Reikishi, the Illustrated Warrior (and a movie that never was
One of the things I mentioned in my look at Way of the Warrior (WOTW) was how Tucci and the
Crusade team grew more confident in their story telling. At the time issues 5 -8 of Way of the Warrior
were being published, Crusade released the crossover /parallel story of Tomoe
is told in issues 0 to 3 with Shi #6 and Tomoe #1 being the same story with the
issue being published with the two covers Tomoe #1 and Shi #6 and the parallel
stories converging again with Shi Vs Tomoe one shot that sits between issues 8
and 9 of Shi WOTW.
Tomoe then encounters Witchblade again between issues 9 and 10 of WOTW.
Do you need to read the Tomoe comics to understand what is happening in WOTW? I’d say except for Shi Vs Tomoe you don’t need to read those comics to follow the story but they enrich your reading of those comics telling us what Tomoe is doing.
****
Shiseiji is where we see the Manga influence appear and we
get a story told in Manga style (read back to front) with Manga influenced art that
explores the unnamed illegitimate son of Ana’s nemesis Arashi hunting Shi and discovering
that she is Ana. The battle between him and Shi does not end well for the
bastard. Even unluckier is the meeting
with Tomoe.
The story opens with the events of issue 1 of WotW and
finishes between issues 9 and 10. I liked the side story that tells us what
happened in between issues.
(The Manga influence also appeared in Shi ½ from Wizard
Entertainment -also known as Manga Shi ½ and the Manga Shi 2000 miniseries. More on these later.)
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Rekishi is a two issue retelling/summary of Way of the
Warrior from the point of view of Detective Joe LaBianca which nicely
summarises Way of the Warrior .
****
Shi: Illustrated Warrior was published in 2002, a prose
retelling of Way of the Warrior by Caig Shaw Gardner. I initially wondered if it was intended to be
the novelisation of the Shi film that never happened. After some research it
turns out that the novelisation was just the Way of Warrior comic and
independent of the movie – but I presume that there may have been some plans
for synergy with the novel and the movie coming out at the same or similar
times.
The art is beautiful and Gardner stays fairly close to the
events of both Way of the Warrior and Tomoe.
One change is that Gardner inconsistently swaps the races of Ana’s
parents so her father is the Caucasian American and her mother is
Japanese. Her mother is still a devout
Catholic but it makes for an odd read with the clash of cultures seemingly
reduced by the change and undercut by the seeming forgetting of which parent is
which race.
*****
Shi: The Motion Picture – it’s unclear what happened to the movie – Franchise
Pictures and Crusade Entertainment released a Cannes Film Festival Preview
edition in 1999.
Tia Carrere was both producing (with her husband) and
starring in the film. I could speculate as
Carrere and her husband divorced in 2000, Franchise had released Battlefield
Earth which had lost a lot of money and lead to a lawsuit against the company
at that time. (Franchise’s model is interesting – take passion projects stuck
in studio limbo, negotiate reduced salaries for the stars to lower costs and
get the film made. There were successes The Art of War starring Wesley Snipes,
The Whole Nine Yards starring Bruce Willis)
The Cannes preview gives some script pages and some story
boards – the movie seems to be adding new characters and costumes as well as
keeping the overall battle between Shi and Arashi.
In interviews I’ve seen Billy Tucci say that Ming Na Wen was
at least in talks for Tomoe and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa for Arashi. More’s the pity that we never got this movie.