By: Joshua Hale Fialkov (story), Andrea Sorrentino (art), Marcelo Maiolo (colors
The Story: The Van Helsings offer a very attractive insurance policy.
The Review: No need for a full-blown editorial, but when people complain about sameness of offering half a dozen Batman titles at once, yet simultaneously criticize the variety of choices available—well, it’s funny. One of DC’s initiatives in its relaunch is to inject diversity into their entire line. Not racially, of course, as the utter failures of Mister Terrific and Static Shock attest. But you can’t deny the tonal landscape of the DCU has colored a lot since it rebooted itself.
So you can easily figure out the clockwork in the publishers’ head in choosing I, Vampire as part of its pristine line-up of 52 titles, especially over so many other deserving ones. Fialkov definitely offers a very different voice from much anything else in mainstream comics: passionate yet detached, philosophical but without much investment in its philosophy. It may very well be the most driven and somehow also careless series you read from DC.
With such a mixture of conflicting values, little wonder the title gets strength and weakness from the same things. On the one hand, the love and violence between Andrew and Mary are deeply fascinating to watch, because each element exists in equal measure and, more importantly, at the same time. Similar couples bounce back and forth between lust and enmity, but Andrew and Mary are the only one I’ve seen thus far that can be totally affectionate while doling out bloody abuse on each other.
On the other hand, watching them is not unlike watching that couple in your circle of friends who never stop fighting yet never actually quit each other. Maybe it’s just the fact that I don’t live on a steady diet of reality shows—or any, for that matter—but that kind of drama gets exhausting even to experience from the sidelines after a while. Fiction has an even lower tolerance for this kind of ongoing relationship. Because stories demand evolution and change, Andrew and Mary’s inability to compromise their positions bears a certain futility for this title.
It’s no surprise, then, that the honeymoon period has once again ended so soon after their reconciliation in #8. Mary wants vampires to rule the world and Andrew does not, and from the look of things, the vast majority of vampires share Mary’s views by nature. For Andrew to plan for the Van Helsings’ arrival, yet express shock when he can’t broker peace between a group of creatures geared for violence and another with centuries-ingrained hatred, seems naïve at best.
The Van Helsings are just wonderfully Rambo-like in their craziness, though. Arriving upon a flight of warplanes, dispensing napalm in their wake before abandoning their transports in a mass parachute drop (Tig commenting to John as their pilots also jump off to join the attack: “I hate you so, so, so much.”), screaming, “Death to the hellspawn!”—more of this, and it just might make up for the pointless pontificating uttered by everyone in this title. John and Van Helsing’s “debate” (if you can call such wandering musings a debate) hints at some interesting points, but doesn’t actually lead anywhere interesting, probably since it’s interrupted by a napalm attack.
Besides a complete mastery of urban horror, Sorrentino’s art is apparently very suitable for a bombastic, Untouchables style of action. His art relies less on defined linework and more on shape and shadow pieced together to form more of a suggestion of an image. You know what you’re looking at, but you don’t know what it means exactly. You can say Sorrentino’s art lends the script a gravitas and tension that it perhaps doesn’t earn.
Conclusion: While laying out a lot of interesting threads, the story doesn’t pick them up and take full advantage of them. More and more, this title seems more about tone than substance, and that may not be enough for the near future.
Grade: B-
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – I was debating whether to release this review late, but I figure later is better than never. What do you guys think? I don’t plan to make this a common occurrence, by the way; this week has just been crazy.