Vampirella #1 – Review

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.