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.) (more…)