Overdrawn at the Blood Bank

So, I picked up the first issue of the new Vampirella Comics Magazine the other day...

If that sounds like a punchline to anyone else, you're not alone. Honestly, I never imagined picking up an issue of something like Vampirella myself, but this new launch as a magazine was supposed to bring Vampirella herself to a new level in comicdom. It was supposed to combine quality creators with the character, along with a more mature outlook that wouldn't embarrass any sensible reader. As you can tell by the cover, you're still going to be embarrassed if you take this puppy out in public. Tits and ass are still in full fore, unlike the revamp of Lady Death, this is just the old dog in refurbished clothes.

I suppose that my hesitations when looking over the solicitations a couple months ago, deciding whether to order this, were well deserved, even now to the point where the original cover painting by Mark Texeira has been enlarged and cropped to make the nearly nude Vampirella even larger on the cover. I guess I only have myself to blame. Now, I'm not intent on wholly bashing the entire magazine -- there are indeed some highlights -- but it seems as though the new sensibilities work against the choices for the cover and the content within -- much like the smutty Greg Horn covers on Emma Frost work against reading the more "wholesome" coming-of-age story within.

Primarily, the new sensibilities are twofold. The first is that the book has now embraced and magazine format, and as such, is going to showcase more than just comics, and more than just Vampirella material. The second, is that quality creators are being enticed into doing Vampirella stories, rather than just the usual run-of-the-mill T&A artists.

To satisfy the first criterion, there are interviews in this issue with Alan Moore and Mark Wheatley. Both are incredibly brief -- totaling seven pages in all -- but they attempt to broaden outward from just Vampirella. Alan Moore talks briefly about the upcoming re-release of his novel, Voice of the Fire, as well as Top Shelf's forthcoming volumes of The Mirror of Love and Lost Girls. Personally, this is the piece that got my attention in the first place, but at a scant four pages of text, it amounts to little more than a promo for Moore's forthcoming work. If you were thinking of picking this up just for the Moore interview, that would be a bad call; read it in the store and leave it on the racks. I can honestly say that the interview with Moore is at odds with everything else in the book. Being Alan Moore, this history of the beginnings of his novel are quite interesting, even though whoever copy-edited it left a major gaffe -- with "pneumonic" being used instead of "mnemonic", a nice little malapropism. This kind of thing actually runs through the non-comics segments, with typos and misused words prevalent, it drags the book further away from being "professional". The Wheatley interview is a nice promo for his new Frankenstein Mobster book, although there is no great insight into its production or anything else, just the standard song and dance. There is, however, a brief snippet of a "Frankenstein Mobster meets Vampirella" strip, that apparently in order to read we must go to the Vampirella website. Personally, I'm more interested in that than the other text pieces that I'll discuss below.

In addition to the interviews with the two comics creators, there are also brief text pieces -- and large images -- of the new Vampirella model, Kitana Baker, and one with convention nut who dresses up like Vampirella, Diana Knight. Both are little more than printed soundbytes, appearing vacuous, and only reinforcing that the pieces are only there for the pictures of nearly naked girls. I'm not even going to start on how many problems I have with this sort of thing -- if you want softcore porn, just buy softcore porn, there's plenty of it available. Things like this truthfully don't titillate, they just serve as an outlet for people who possibly can't regularly buy the true adult flesh rags, like say, children and teenagers. ...and honestly, as I said of the cover, it works against those of us buying it for the Moore or Wheatley interviews, or even the horror fans who this mag seems to be targeting.

That target actually becomes apparent in the "reviews" section. I use sneer quotes since most of the capsules aren't really reviews, but rewritten promotional material, especially the comics review section, which doesn't actually review anything, it just puts together some quotes from the horror comics' creators from other interviews, uncredited, and text pieces in the books themselves.

Of the second criterion, there are two comics stories: a black and white tale both written and illustrated by Steve Lieber, and the other in colour, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, with art by Gabriel Rearte and Meth.

The former from Lieber seems to be exactly in line with the new sensibility of bringing back some "class" to Vampirella. The story, "The Killing Floor", is your typical rote horror yarn you'd expect from a book like Creepy or Eerie, with our protagonist and her hapless male friend crashing a cult intent on raising the dead with the years of blood that has seeped beneath the killing floor of an abattoir. It's nothing particularly ground-breaking or enlightening, but it's a solid genre piece, well illustrated and written. The emphasis isn't here to showcase Vampirella's assets, it's to tell a succinct horror yarn, and as such Lieber performs admirably.

The other comic, "Vampirella Must Die", is exactly what many have come to hate about the "bad girl" fetish of comic books. It's bad. Very bad. The intent here seems to be cheesecake, mixed with "humorous" lampoons of superhero cliches and conventions, and the result is a bad Image comic book, particularly a Rob Liefeld helmed Image book, along the lines of Glory and whoever the other "Maximum Press" heroine was...Avengelyne? It's fails miserably at being worthwhile, made even worse from the promise that this will be the magazine's first serial.

I guess with that in mind, I'm given even less reason to return for the next issue.