A shy waitress awakens to find herself covered in blood, with a dead man cooling at her feet. She flees, horrified, but then she's kidnapped. Her kidnappers explain that she is the reincarnation of an Indian snake goddess. 68 English mercenaries/explorers slaughtered her people and her fellow snake god--ever since, the goddess has reincarnated over and over, seeking vengeance. Only when she manages to kill all 68 in a single lifetime will they finally be able to rest.

I'm over the trope of superpowers making women out-of-control and hypersexual, particularly when a white woman's *Indian* self is the aspect that is animalistic and aggressive. And I'd be thrilled to read a comic in which rape of the female character wasn't part of the plot. It just gets a little tiring, tbh. So I won't say this was an unproblematic story.

But while I wasn't particularly impressed by the idea or the execution, at least it isn't a retread of Spider-man's origin story, or yet another Crossover Event. And though I found it hard to distinguish the male characters from each other, the art is at least grounded in reality: no balloon breasts or 24-pack abs. Perhaps this story will find its feet and progress beyond its origins. ( )

All of these people are just kind of ick. I mean, I get that a vengeful snake god needs to have horrible people to wreck vengeance upon, but there's gotta be something redeeming in the story, some glimpse of goodness somewhere, for me to continue with the series; I don't see that here at all. ( )

Virgin Comics launched a few years back with a bunch of titles whose mythos was rooted in non-western cultures. They also brought on board some big names to help with concepts and perhaps give their titles a little more cache. Hence we have Deepak Chopra's Sadhu, John Woo's Seven Brothers and here, Shekhar Kapur's Snake Woman.

Now to be honest initially I was a little skeptical about what precisely the director of the historically defective but lively Elizabeth, the even more historically defective and dismal Elizabeth II and the execrable remake of the Four Feathers might be able to bring to the comic book format. But then of course this is the man who made Mr. India back in the 80s which was essentially a lighthearted super-hero movie in which Amish Puri played Mogambo, surely Bollywood's most iconic villain (after Sholay's Gabbar Singh).

So what do we have here? Jessica Peterson is an average, liberal arts-educated gal waitressing in L.A. But she is also the object of attention of a secret society known as the 68 - themselves the reincarnation of 68 crew-members of an East India Company merchantman who slaughtered the inhabitants of a village in India in the 18th century, including the priests of the temple of the local snake gods. Now they are cursed to be hunted down and killed by the incarnation of the Naga snake goddess in life, after life, unless they can find a way to end the curse. Unsurprsingly it turns out that Jessica is the current vessel of this spirit of vengeance. Its an interesting take on the Naga legends of India and makes for a fairly entertaining read. The art is solid. The villain is suitibly villainous. And if the manner in which our protagonist comes to discover the hidden power within her, it cleaves to tried and true conventions of storytelling. ( )