I, Vampire #11 – Review

By: Joshua Hale Fialkov (story), Andrea Sorrentino (art), Marcelo Maiolo (colors)

The Story: As it turns out, the undead feeding on the undead is only a good idea in theory.

The Review: Considering how many titles I picked up within the first month of the DC relaunch (thirty-one) and how many I added along the way (twelve) and how many I still keep up with (twenty-six), it’s actually quite an achievement for I, Vampire to have stuck around on my pull list for this long.  Honestly, I would’ve guessed that I’d drop I, Vampire long before I dropped Teen Titans or Legion Lost, so this series has surpassed my expectations in many ways.

But upon some reflection, this title really stopped doing that somewhere shortly after the first two or three issues.  What drew me to the series in the first place—what convinced me that I wouldn’t just be reading Twilight in a comic book (which probably ranks up there in my Things I Would Commit a Felony Not to Do list) was both the complex relationship between Andrew and Mary and the conflicting ideologies they embodied.

I, Vampire #10 – Review

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.

I, Vampire #9 – Review

By: Joshua Hale Fialkov (story), Andrea Sorrentino (art), Marcelo Maiolo (colors)

The Story: Even monster-slaying can’t resist going corporate after all these centuries.

The Review: Now that I’ve had a month to mull upon this series’ most recent events, I must conclude the whole Justice League Dark crossover and the “Rise of the Vampires” were a bit premature.  Since Andrew still hadn’t made peace with his role in the vampire world, for Fialkov to suddenly thrust him into such a major shift in position felt like an almost unintended move, one which neither Andrew nor Fialkov know what to do with from now on.

After all, now that Andrew has this massive army of vampires under his wing, it’s not exactly clear what he plans to do with them all.  He clearly won’t allow them to feed upon actual humans, but he can’t keep them cooped up in a Hooverville out in the Utah desert forever—that weekly shipment of “five hundred head of cattle” will get pretty dear before too long.  It’s an unsustainable situation, a fact Mary points out with some amusement.

I, Vampire #8 – Review

By: Joshua Hale Fialkov (story), Andrea Sorrentino (art), Marcelo Maiolo (colors)

The Story: Andrew and Mary take another step in their Ross-and-Rachel relationship.

The Review: Between you and me, I hate crossover events.  I’m not talking about Marvel and DC’s Big Events, the ones with their own maxi-series and scads of tie-ins, most of which are frivolous and immaterial.  With these you can choose which to buy, and which to rightfully ignore.  It’s a bit different when one title’s story spills into another, then spills back in again later, practically force you into picking up issues you never intended to get in the first place.

So it annoyed me to find “Rise of the Vampires” crossed over into Justice League Dark, a title I unceremoniously dropped just a few months before.  While this issue doesn’t start off in a drastically different place than where we left off last month, it’s nonetheless clear that a fairly important chunk of the story happened elsewhere, as we see Andrew Bennett returned from the “dead” and better than ever since Xanadu apparently “shunted” Cain’s power to him.

I, Vampire #7 – Review

By: Joshua Hale Fialkov (writer), Andrea Sorrentino (artist), Marcelo Maiolo (colorist)

The Story: Apparently, magic is the high-potency acid of the vampire world.

The Review: In some ways, I don’t find this series groundbreaking as I find that it breaks away from the preconceived notions it invites you to make about it.  Think of the first time you heard the premise: a slender vampire with heartthrob looks pitting himself against his own lover, whom he turned himself.  Who knew you’d get a story about two individuals with incompatible views on life, yet who are attracted to each other all the more even as they vie for each other’s deaths?

Even more appreciably, the series has avoided all the usual nail-biting brooding you usually expect from these semi-romantic vampire tales nowadays, focusing more on the more violent, morally questionable qualities of the creatures.  In this issue, Fialkov truly dabbles in angst for the first time as Andrew uses the luxury of non-existence to reflect on his actions: “I’ve done more harm than good.”  But even here, Andy doesn’t ruminate for long, rejecting the notion that he’s destined for greater things with a dismissive, “Destiny is for teenage girls.  I spew death.”

You might wonder whom he’s scoffing at so boldly, but not even death-spewing Andrew can get that answer.  We can deduce a few things by simple observation.  This off-page voice must have some prime role in the balance of the universe, since he recounts the primordial origins of Cain (“Before there was light or dark or heaven or earth, there was blackness.”) with authority.  And since he can keep the slain Andrew from whisking off to the afterlife, and hints that he can restore Andrew to the world of the living, he must be pretty powerful as well.

Yet for all that, we still don’t know how Cain and Andrew’s lives are tied together, considering the former predates the latter by eons.  We only get a hint that an “army of great mystical warriors,” most likely the Demon Knights, had something to do with using Andrew as the “seal” on Cain’s imprisonment.

I, Vampire #5 – Review

By: Joshua Hale Fialkov (writer), Andrea Sorrentino (artist), Marcelo Maiolo (colorist)

The Story: You’re one to talk, Batman—most people think you’re a vampire, too.

The Review: Throwing in any guest star of the Dark Knight’s caliber can be a risky business.  As a major character with an established, popular fan-base, people have certain expectations of him.  It’s something like wearing a sombrero at work; you can’t really go walking around, doing your normal thing, and not explain to people what’s the deal with the sombrero.  So it goes with Batman.  If you want to have him in there, you better have a good reason for it.

I suppose the fact that vampires have taken nest in Gotham is reason enough to get Batman involved.  More than that, Fialkov puts the caped crusader to good use, balancing both his hyper-competence with the fact that he’s mostly out of place with these particular foes.  Despite Andrew’s unnatural abilities, Batman’s able to hold his own, actually getting the vampire riled up.  At the same time, you know Batman only has an academic idea of what he’s up against, a frustration he expresses by being gruffer than ever: “You’re still a monster…  Fine.  We work together.  For now.”

Despite the presence of such a major icon in their midst, the regular characters keep their composure and make it clear this is their title.  While John does little more in the issue than try to keep a fight from breaking out among his companions, Tig actually attempts to incite one (“He’s a vampire!  He’s in love with the one who did all of this.  Kill him.  Better yet, let me.”).  If you hoped she’d be a force of cuteness, albeit a deadly one, in this series, you learn very quickly that she’s not taken in by Andrew’s charm, and she has a lot of resentment left to work through.

I, Vampire #3 – Review

By: Joshua Hale Fialkov (writer), Andrea Sorrentino (artist), Marcelo Maiolo (colorist)

The Story: Thank heaven for little girls—who shoot arrows into your arms.

The Review: The last three years or so have been something of a revival for vampires in the media, everything from the grossly romanticized (Twilight) to the artistic (American Vampire) to those in between (Vampire Diaries).  In many of these works, writers have taken to humanizing these creatures of the night, emphasizing their capacity for self-restraint and love so you almost forget the risk of their constant bloodlust.

This series takes the opposite route.  The opening pages demonstrate what happens when the vampires decide to let their vices go unchecked: nationwide fear as four cities swiftly fall victim to Mary’s revolution.  In each of these cities, you see the bloody ruins of what the vampires leave behind in the wake of their attacks, a grim portent of the dystopia that awaits the world should they succeed in the long run.

For that reason, you become highly invested in Andrew, “the only man who can save [the world],” according to best friend and fellow vampire hunter John Troughton.  Previous issues pretty well established our hero’s merciless dedication to policing his own kind.  That he has a completely loyal ally who grew up learning to hate vampires gives credit to Andrew’s virtue, and it gives you a sense of relief that he won’t have to fight this battle alone.