Vampirella #1 // Review
It’s night. It’s raining. Someone gets bitten. Later there’s a woman walking down the street in Brooklyn. Long, bare legs can be seen wearing long black boots with stiletto heels beneath a classic trench coat. She’s going-in to a pawn shop run by a guy who looks a LOT like the late, great Dennis O’Neil. (Can’t be him, though: the guy at the pawn shop claims to be 211 years old) She’s there to pawn some stuff she found on a body before it stopped moving at the beginning of Vampirella #1. Writer Christopher Priest continues a journey with the beloved vampire in an issue that is brought to page and panel by Ergün Gündüz.
The Dennis O’Neil guy is paying the woman for things she picked-up after making a victim of someone who was haunting the night. A meth head. Makes her eel a bit better about killing someone and robbing their corpse, but she’s got her own problems and she DOES have to make it work. She’s a single mom. Had to risk her life to get the baby out of a cult. But she won. All she has to do is feed the baby the bottle and keep telling herself. that she won. All she has to do is keep telling herself that this is what she wanted.
Priest finds a relatively untrodden path with vampire fiction: parenthood. Ella is a single mother of an infant...and a vampire. Some of what Priest is exploring here comes across as a bit of a revelation. Vampirism has been so popular over the years because everyone can relate to it on some level, but it’s not something you generally want to think about when taking care of a vulnerable, little baby. The complexities of that make for a very appealing sort of supernatural drama. The contemporary vampire drama genre is so appealing, but it tends to get a bit repetitious. Whether or not he actually is, Priest definitely SEEMS to be moving in a new direction at the outset of a whole new series.
Gündüz. manages some really sharp work with the nuances in mood that play-out over the course of the issue. Ella’s life is remarkably volatile and she’s dealing with a hell of a mind-bender of a plot arc over the course of the end of her previous series. Gündüz switches gears, modes and moods vevery bit as quickly as the script calls for. There are some pretty serious shifts from quiet and contemplative moods to intricaet drama to sudden bursts of violence. Gündüz covers it all with some brilliantly immersive atmosphere that plays-out through the issue’s color.
It’s nice to see Priest settle the narrative down into something much more coherent than he’d been managing over the course of the past...year or so with Ella. As nice as the surreal shifts in scene and tone were in a nonlinear narrative, it’s nice to see something rendered with a bit more of an eye towards pacing. If Priest and company can maintain the currently momentum, Vampirella could end up being a great deal of fun again.
