Before there was SPY x FAMILY there was Tista. Tatsuya Endō's first serialized work shares some themes with his latest – heroine Tista Lone is an orphan who became an assassin after the Catholic Church experimented on her and transplanted her adoptive father's eye into her head; you might notice that really only the "Catholic Church sponsored assassinations" is missing from Yor and Anya's combined pasts. Tista operates under the code name “Sister Militia” and all of her guns and ammo are inscribed with Latin phrases with very clear religious links, so it's something of a mystery as to why the NYPD hasn't yet figured out that she's somehow involved with the church, but when the story opens, lead detective Macky remains baffled and the FBI is about to enter the hunt.

This likely sounds more absurd than the story actually is. Taking place in modern-day New York City, the two-volume series follows Tista as she begins to have a dual crisis of faith/mental breakdown, both of which are 100% understandable in her situation. Taken in by the church when she was orphaned (something, a flashback implies, that she wasn't too heartbroken by), Tista was given to an adoptive father who was the previous incarnation of Sister Militia, although we don't know his code name. When he died, one of his eyes was given to her in a transplant, granting her his ability to see everything as if through a rifle's scope. As this volume goes on, we learn that it also seems to have given her a version of Dissociative Identity Disorder, making “Sister Militia” and “Tista” two largely separate people.

Perhaps because of this, she's largely kept herself aloof from others, even in her classes at school. This changes when she meets the unfortunately named Arty Drawer, a third-year art major at her university, and as she begins to want to be with him, her life begins to fall apart from within. Tista seems to believe that she can be friends with Arty (who may want to be more than with her), and after their meet-cute when he saves her from being hit by a car, she agrees to hang out with him and very nearly go on a date. But things are shaken up when her latest target turns out to be orphan Arty's guardian, who is using his art gallery as a front for drug trafficking. Suddenly Tista is thrown into a full-blown identity crisis on top of a crisis of faith. She finds herself unable to handle the moral quandaries she's fallen into. Is it still right to kill a drug dealer if he's somebody's father figure? Is it okay for her to be going around killing people just because her father figure(s) tell her to? It's as if an internal wall that Tista erected has suddenly crumbled and she can no longer keep “Tista” and “Sister Militia” separate from each other. That means that now Tista has to think about what Sister Militia does and what that means for her. Is Tista even allowed to exist without Sister Militia? Or does she owe her life to the people who took her in? Given that it was them who made her a killer in the first place, that's not an easy question for her to answer, even if we on the outside can see that what the church did to her is unspeakably cruel.

Meanwhile, Arty isn't willing to give up on Tista. A piece of him suspects that she might be Sister Militia, but that doesn't stop him from wanting to find her. There's a sense that he thinks that if he can just figure out what her deal is he could find a way to save her, and that's both remarkably innocent of him (and a reminder that boys get poisoned by fairy tales just as much as girls do; a piece of him clearly wants to be her Prince Charming) and dangerously naïve. Within the gritty world of the book there are no guarantees that she even can be saved, and that's something that Arty is either unaware of or willfully ignoring and that the priest who is Sister Militia's overseer is struggling with. The church seems to be working with the math that sacrificing the one to save the many is worth it. There's no certainty that Arty will agree with that…or be able to do anything about it.

As you can see by the character names (which also include a flaky FBI “psychoanalyst” named Snow, and Tista's name likely comes from the Latin for “sad”), Endo really hasn't hit his stride yet, and the story isn't campy enough (or at all) to support the sort of silly name scheme he's employing. The art is remarkably solid, with a good sense of place and an excellent use of fuzzy, squiggly outlines to show how Tista sees the world without her glasses, as well as a good sense of motion and careful use of selective gore. But the disconnect between art, plot, and character names is jarring, and at times the story is so dark as to feel overwhelming.

Tista is a difficult story, replete with themes of what we owe those who "save" us and just how much power any one person (or organization) should have and a content warning for the explicit death of a child. It's only two volumes long, so it's not a huge commitment, but honestly, just because you enjoy the Forger family's escapades does not mean you'll like this – in fact, it may be the opposite.