Arana Volume 3: Night Of The Hunter Digest Paperback – 8 Mar. 2006

Arana was another of Marvel's collections designed to appeal to an early to mid-teen audience, which I guess must have followed on the success of The Runaways. It certainly used the same presentation theme being published in Digest format and with similar high standard comic book almost pastel art (just my opinion). This series was published in the early to mid-first decade and the `Buffy' influence shows. (feisty teen-age girl with secret identity keeping all this hidden from her parent -widowed father)Basically Arana is a Latin-American teenage girl that has inherited powers from way-back. She is a protégé of The Spiders who are involved in a secret war with the (evil) Sisterhood of the Wasp (which actually has an awful lot of men in its ranks...anyway).This is not a stand-alone book, you really do need volumes 1 & 2 to understand the Whys and Wherefores and as well The Whos. If you have read those then you would not be disappointed with this, the story has a neat and reasonable ending. In this volume Arana's mother makes appearances and these ties in with the semi-mystical tone the story arc which has been prevalent in the previous volumes. Arana also confronts the man possibly responsible for her mother's death. It's salient point in the climax that whereas he taunts her that she won't kill him because it will be on her conscience, she lets him fall to his likely death and says `My Conscience if Fine', and there is then a great deal of ambiguity all piled into the last few pages questioning her actions, his motives, her responses which raises the bar of the whole story arc from one of the `lighter' offerings from Marvel.The ending suggests this series could have continued. Arana continued to make quality appearances; being a central figure in the Ms Marvel issues of Civil War and her own short run as `Spider Girl' in the Marvel 616-verse (no connection with Spider Girl in the MC verse).Well worth looking into as something different from the mainstream Marvel works.