By: Eric Trautman (writer), Wagner Reis (art), Marshall Dillon (letters) and Inlight Studio (colors)
The Story: Vampirella gets updated for a modern age and sets out to battle some problematic vampires.
What’s Good: The art is pretty good. The characters all look good and appropriate. No oddly proportioned bodies. Everything is nice and dark and moody. This art will work for this series.
What’s Not So Good: Pretty much everything else. It isn’t bad per se, but the overall direction of this comic is a little troubling. Do a Google image search on Vampirella. Chances are you are going to get a lot of cheesecake. So when you slap the name “Vampirella” on the cover and have cheesecake cover art, you have some expectations of getting the 1970′s style Archie Goodwin/Frank Frazetta goodness. I wanted a slight amount of campiness and I wanted cheesecake from this title. Instead what we are served under the deceiving cover is an okay female vigilante story. Vampirella now wears normal clothing and is a vampire killer. And there is nothing wrong with that, but they just shouldn’t call it Vampirella. Of course, if they called it something else, it probably wouldn’t sell very well.
The biggest problem with this book is that without the camp and cheesecake, there isn’t much to differentiate it in a very crowded comics landscape. What we have is a mixture of Blade, Buffy and Batwoman. Except those stories are already written. I don’t need another one. When I read a comic that isn’t Marvel/DC, I really want something that is edgier than what corporate editors at Marvel or DC would feel comfortable with…and this comic didn’t deliver.
Looking at the story from a technical standpoint, the story is heavily dependent upon inner monologue narration boxes to tell the story. I happen to not care for that form of extensive exposition. Your mileage may vary.
Conclusion: False advertising. Change the name and cover on this, and this title could find an audience with the folks who are starved for more strong female heroes. In fact, I might have liked this better if it didn’t have the Vampirella name associated with it because this just isn’t Vampirella. I would say that it is unfair to hold the book to the standard of that name, but they chose to license the property and use this story.
Grade: D
- Dean Stell
Filed under: Dynamite Entertainment Tagged: | Comic Book Reviews, Dean Stell, Dynamite Entertainment, Eric Trautmann, inLight Studios, Marshall Dillon, review, Vampirella, Vampirella #1, Vampirella #1 review, Wagner Reis, Weekly Comic Book Review
really? I only subbed to it for some “90s bad girl” style action. I hope the new Lady Death does not fail at this (comes out in Jan right?).
Hey Nesto,
If that’s the case, you might enjoy it. As I said, part of my kinda negative review is that I feel like they pulled a bait and switch. It would be kinda like if the characters from Watchmen came back and the comic showed them being members of an old-guy beach band. That could be a really fun comic with excellent writing and nicely illustrated, but they’d get backlash if they slap Watchmen on the cover. Glad you seem to be enjoying it because I usually don’t like to see a comic fail.
Apparently, Vampirella wouldn’t fit in today’s Twilight vampire fad, so we got this instead. Sounds lame.
I rather enjoyed Vampirella back in the day. It was a really, really guilty pleasure, sort of like Danger Girl.
This review makes me glad that my LCS got shorted. Thanks for the heads-up, Dean. Really appreciate it.
-Alex
It’s not BAD….it just isn’t Vampirella. They should have just called it something else (but then no one would have bought it).