One Great Panel: Witch Hat Atelier

Everything, right here, all at once.

There’s a lot of planning that goes into making one panel work exceptionally better than any other given panel. Or a lot of luck. Maybe both. But a lot has to converge on one spot, one image.

Not every series even has the capacity to produce one great panel. It’s just the nature of the storytelling. Some of my favorites series just don’t pack singular panels with the same juiciness as other series, and that’s no fault of theirs.

Witch Hat Atelier, though? Always, always going to produce one. It was just a matter of time. So this probably won’t be the last One Great Panel I do for this series.

Anyway, getting on with it, this one great panel is Volume 3, Page 105.

Context: This is Master Qifrey, he’s a very skilled witch who has four young apprentices. One of those apprentices, the protagonist of the story, Coco, is being sabotaged by a bad witch. This bad witch gave Coco a vial of cursed ink with which she caused accidental damage that may land her in trouble. Qifrey here, who has been omnipotent up until this point, is trying to figure out where this ink came from when the bad witch bests him and takes the ink.

Okay, so there are layers here we need to pull apart, but for starters, we just have to look at the artistic direction: Complete void, shadowed character. This panel is from Qifrey’s perspective. This is his feelings, expounded on the panel, a representation of the moment. It’s his complete devastation isolating him into this fetal position he’s in. He has never appeared as such, never in a void, never shaded as he is.

But!

Segueing into the second remarkable thing about this panel—this is the first time Qifrey hasn’t been in control of the narrative. He’s made little mistakes, nothing major, nothing that showed any sort of weakness.

Here, he is weak. He is defeated. It’s our first experience seeing this side of Qifrey and, as such, it deepens his character in the complete opposite direction it had been deepening. We’re still early in the narrative, so Qifrey’s growth is primarily one directional. He’s compassionate and empathetic towards all of his apprentices, each in their own way, and he is a skilled teacher with a bit of goober in him. That’s his growth push.

This is not that. This is his own, personal failure. This is him alone, not as a teacher, but as a witch.

Character growth aside, plot wise, this is what we (I?) call a pivot point. The primary plot drive doesn’t change, but it does pivot in another direction. Now, our primary goal is getting that cursed ink back. Before, it was how this “bad” witch was affecting Coco. So while we’ve still got the same good guys vs bad guys set-up, we’ve just changed the battlefront.

What a haul in this panel. Dynamism from an already dynamic character, artistically vibrant, plot pivots, oh my.