One of the things I’ve realized about myself is I don’t make good choices in media. And I mean much worse than the part where I’m running a blog dissecting terrible books.
As I’ve mentioned before, I really like the idea of zombies and apocalypses and horror. Unfortunately, I’m not a gore fan, I’m a story fan, which means I am pretty much continually disappointed. The fact I tend not to find anything good just makes me keep looking.
Which leads us to reading this comic. It’s about vampires, which have an even poorer track record in comics than zombies. But, it’s about Europe being devastated by plague and the vampires picking over the carcass. Plague makes for a generally great apocalypse and I really love the idea of monsters springing up right when it looks like we might not make it already. Really grinds the hopelessness in. And as it develops, they go with the quite serviceable idea that the vampires and/or mass plague deaths are serving to wake up or spontaneously generate new horrors, which in turn generates more fear and death, which generates new horrors, because the idea the horror generation can be exponential is great.
But…while it’s on the competently executed side of things, it is very much competently done comics, with all the usual caveats this involves. Namely, I sure hope no one picked this book up for the women, and I hope you’ll find it entertaining watching a guy mowing down vampires that seem to have the durability of sponge cake as our supposed threat. (I will credit the comic as mostly focusing the suspense on other aspects, like if he’ll be in the right place to mow down vampires before they kill people, but it still has pages upon pages of fight scenes where he is obviously in no danger.)
The latter part sort of has an explanation, except the creators fumbled the ball due, no doubt, to the fact that all main characters in horror comics can mow down dozens of monsters without breaking a sweat so their standards for when to pull out signs of obvious intervention are incredibly high. That just makes me more disappointed. The guy spends the series furious with God and feeling almost cursed with his life and driven only by vengeance, and eventually we see that he really does seem to be almost unkillable – a perfectly valid option given how much supernatural stuff is happening. But first we have to sit through far too many issues of vampires zerg rushing him without so much as scratching him while not even thinking this is weird to themselves. In a decently plotted story, we’d see him getting injured each time but always bouncing back, until you slowly started to wonder how he always got so cut up without ever getting any permanent damage, and how he seemed to shrug off seemingly crippling wounds even received minutes ago…and, and this is important, by contrasting this with injuries otherwise being serious for the rest of the cast, as opposed to them also running on standard comics rules of dying instantly as soon as a vampire appears within ten feet, unless the main character stands next to them shouting to fight together or gave them a pep talk earlier in which case they’re able to hold their own against a swarm. Also, the main character’s lost a leg and has a wooden prosthetic. The moment my suspension of disbelief exploded into pieces so fast they ignited was when he was scaling a castle wall and edging along a narrow strip of stone. He doesn’t have a knee. The artist draws the wooden leg as having a knee joint as if that covers things, because obviously as long as the leg has a hinge there, the part where it’s attached to fucking nothing is irrelevant. What would have been fine would have been to give him a below the knee injury, so it wasn’t blatantly obvious he’s violating the laws of physics every time he takes a step, then have the mystical cursed life to kill vampires thing cover the fact a pegleg is still a big detriment in terms of mobility. All of it could’ve worked if only they had any subtlety.
The same cannot be said for the women, who are just a disaster. The sad thing is, I think they were actually trying here.
This post, we’ll examine the first arc, The Plague Ships. The first sequence has him chasing some vampires, who move to escape, and lightning fries them that may have been called down by this old woman who’s watching it with magic. He meets her, then he meets Hot Granddaughter, who quickly assures him that her grandmother is dumb and crazy and definitely has no supernatural powers. Her grandmother then says that she definitely absolutely should not go with this guy who just finished explaining he wasn’t even trying to kill their vampires but just get them to tell him about another vampire and is in fact angry the lightning killed them, because in addition to him obviously being a suicidal driven as he is unconcerned about the suffering of others, he’s actual straight up cursed.
Cursed with manpain. But an ugly woman said it, so obviously the pretty woman has to blow her off and tell the man she’s sure he’s super special and awesome. She repeatedly credits him with saving the town, even though all he did was flush the vampires out and it was her grandmother who actually killed them all. In what I think is an attempt to give her agency, she wants to go with him because she wants to leave the dying town, but she’s the one who knows of a boat to take, gets the guard to give her the key, then gets the ship to take him where he wants to go for free, so it’s pretty unclear why she so desperately needed to go with him in particular.
During this period, we see precisely two more women – one a mother in a single panel cautioning her son, the other a sketchy woman supposedly incinerating bodies except the incinerator doesn’t release any heat. Literally everyone else is a guy. When we get our random shots of plague-afflicted people, they’re guys. When it’s someone doing something, guy.
He tells Hot Girl about his manpainy past – the vampire he hunts murdered his family except for his wife, who then shows up to murder her. She comes back as a vampire, male priests show up to yell at him about how she has to be killed now, he kills her and then hunts down his also vampire family members, who make up the only other female characters we see in this section. Then they’re attacked by fungal-plant zombies and Hot Girl spends the night cowering in one of the subs while he singlehandedly holds them off until dawn.
But, in a shocking twist, she makes it out alive! Possibly because he’d shrug off her death so she’s not really worth the manpain, as well as it being so obvious no reader would care, but hey, that rarely stops comics from killing women.
Except that when she returns we flash over to her grandmother, who this inquisition guy is currently midway through torturing to death and will presumably do the same to her.
So the only female character with anything resembling agency and power has been horribly tortured and is going to die, followed by the only other major female character. Double twist!
But hey, that’s just the first section. It’s still finding its feet. Maybe it’ll get better.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The arcs are bookended by one-shot stories, and the next one gives you a hint.
We’re now back in the original town, where a number of surviving families are clustered in an attic.
Here we see an actual mix of genders, probably because it’s a good way of showing that they’re broken families. We don’t see any men and women sitting together, and no one seems to share children, highlighted by the man holding a baby girl and the mother sitting trying to hold two children at once. But the reason we can have this is because these people are victims.
A boy comes to the window, asking to be let in, and another boy promptly opens it up.
Pictured here is the actor/victim divide. The two boys are the only ones to do anything in this story. The woman should smack that little idiot and lock the shutters back up herself, but she can only yell at him to do it because only he has the power of action.
There is no reason whatsoever that the two kids in this are boys beyond that boys get to have adventures in stories. This is a pervasive problem in media – boys running around is acceptable and girls running around isn’t, so people talk about the former. Writers then reproduce the stuff they hear around them. People read nothing but that and come away thinking it’s a fundamental fact of the universe that only boys could possibly run around having adventures, then the writers produce more of that because they want to be realistic, and now if this complaint was posted on a comic book board, it’d be twenty pages of thirty year old guys explaining it’d be totally impossible for a little girl to run around on rooftops at night and something PC police ruining everything.
But that aside, the storytelling is pretty solid. The kids run around discussing the fact the vampires have been killed by the mysterious man but that the adults don’t believe it, so the other boy says they should find the man so he can tell everyone they’re safe now, they run around more, and the other boy tells Rolf to go under a mysterious dark bridge to find the man but actually it’s a nest of demonic spiders who apparently can’t leave the area, Baltimore shows up, kills the spider-possessed kid and rescues the first, who makes his way back home
It’s a good ending to a story that’s about how you can’t even trust your friends to still be your friends, how that means other people, in turn, can’t trust and aid you. Storytelling: improved! Women: unimportant!
(Incidentally, the friend who’s taken over by spiders has black hair while the unaffected boy is blond and wholesome. COMICS.)