Vampirella/Dracula: Rage #1 // Review
She was going through preeclampsia. It could have been awful. It was. She lost the baby. Ended up killing the only people onboard the boat capable of actually sailing the thing. Then things got horrible for her. She was carrying the child of Dracula. Now she's in the hospital. And there's no question that she's lost the baby in Vampirella/Dracula: Rage #1. Writer Christopher Priest opens a new tale of the famous vampire with artist Christian Rosado. East end company explorer some relatively rare territory with a vampire pregnancy and strange drama in and amidst the horror of a very compelling drama.
The best part of being Dracula is that Dracula doesn't exist. It's also probably one of the more difficult things. After all, if you need help, only a few people have the skills and power to help you. And so Dracula needs to contact one of the few people who can assist. Unfortunately, Victory has her own issues that she's dealing with. Meanwhile, Vampirella knows that her baby is gone, but she knows that it's not dead. It's out there. They've taken it from her, and she's going to need to do something about it.
Dracula is one of those characters that is very, very difficult to get right. Priest does a pretty good job. There's a real sense of ancient manipulation about him. Someone who has the power and wisdom of an immortal but is limited in his ability to do everything he wants. And it's challenging to have his kind of power without things getting very complicated. The delicate intricacies of that drama play out with a great degree of Grace and poetry. It's a fun opening to what is hopefully going to be a really well-articulated horror drama.
Roasado crafts the drama on the page with heavy, scratchy shadows. Occasionally, something gets nailed to the panel and just the right way to really amp up the emotional gravity of the situation. Dracula seems built incredibly Monday and powerfully sinister at the same time. Without the name and the power, he would just appear to be some guy. Putting that to the page the way Rosado does takes a hell of a lot of courage. Victory doesn't believe she's talking to Dracula. Rosado does a brilliant job of making him seem like he COULD just be some guy talking about a vampire and a pregnancy.
With the basic premise of the series, a fully established priest has a long way to go with it. There is an impossibly large amount of complexity in what he is setting up in the first issue. There are a lot of ways that this could go wrong. However, Priest knows precisely what he's doing from the first issue. There isn't much of a margin of error on this sort of thing. You're dealing with two very powerful and prevalent vampires. It's a daunting task for any author.
