Wow, this is sort of CREEPY. Vampirella #1 was supposed to be kind of a major relaunch for DE - big name writer, multiple cover variants...
Yet here it is nearly a week later, and the silence is positively EERIE. That CAN'T be a good sign. Good or bad, at least if people are motivated to comment on something it indicates they care about the character, and the fact that there are no comments here on DE's own forums may be a foreboding sign of failure, as if DE's audience has completely dried up and the first DE Vampi series so alienated Vampi's former fans that they've given up, ceased to care about DE publishing Vampi, and moved on to other things.
While I'm nowhere near the "Vampi expert" that I'm sure other people who used to comment here could fairly claim, I guess it's down to me then.
I liked it. And if you like "classic" Vampi, I think you should like it too. It has a nice retro (but not too retro) vibe to it, like a cross between a well-written example of a Marvel horror comic from the 1970s (like Ghost Rider or Son of Satan, maybe even Tomb of Dracula) and the 1968 Hammer film The Devil Rides Out. It doesn't LOOK like a 1970s Marvel horror comic, mind you, but the writing evokes that period and genre of comics to me, even ending on a last-panel "hook" for issue 2's storyline.
The story here directly references Archie Goodwin's original "Cult of Chaos" story from the early Warren Vampirella magazines (to the point of flashback vignettes), but also carries over some elements from the previous DE Vampi series (the Vatican's clandestine Cestus Dei task force assigned to combat supernatural threats). As such, Vampi is still an agent of the aforementioned agency when the story begins. I don't want to fill this review with a bunch of spoilers, but I'll just say that I was somewhat doubtful whether or not this would win me over, particularly since I'd never read anything by Nancy Collins. It was a pleasant surprise to me to be able to give this an unqualified Thumbs Up, at least based on this one issue. Fingers crossed that it stays as interesting in successive issues, but so far I've got a positive feeling on this one.
Yet here it is nearly a week later, and the silence is positively EERIE. That CAN'T be a good sign. Good or bad, at least if people are motivated to comment on something it indicates they care about the character, and the fact that there are no comments here on DE's own forums may be a foreboding sign of failure, as if DE's audience has completely dried up and the first DE Vampi series so alienated Vampi's former fans that they've given up, ceased to care about DE publishing Vampi, and moved on to other things.
While I'm nowhere near the "Vampi expert" that I'm sure other people who used to comment here could fairly claim, I guess it's down to me then.
I liked it. And if you like "classic" Vampi, I think you should like it too. It has a nice retro (but not too retro) vibe to it, like a cross between a well-written example of a Marvel horror comic from the 1970s (like Ghost Rider or Son of Satan, maybe even Tomb of Dracula) and the 1968 Hammer film The Devil Rides Out. It doesn't LOOK like a 1970s Marvel horror comic, mind you, but the writing evokes that period and genre of comics to me, even ending on a last-panel "hook" for issue 2's storyline.
The story here directly references Archie Goodwin's original "Cult of Chaos" story from the early Warren Vampirella magazines (to the point of flashback vignettes), but also carries over some elements from the previous DE Vampi series (the Vatican's clandestine Cestus Dei task force assigned to combat supernatural threats). As such, Vampi is still an agent of the aforementioned agency when the story begins. I don't want to fill this review with a bunch of spoilers, but I'll just say that I was somewhat doubtful whether or not this would win me over, particularly since I'd never read anything by Nancy Collins. It was a pleasant surprise to me to be able to give this an unqualified Thumbs Up, at least based on this one issue. Fingers crossed that it stays as interesting in successive issues, but so far I've got a positive feeling on this one.
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