Month: May 2025

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Vampirella Archives Volume One

This is a review of Vampirella Archives Volume One. Vampirella first appeared in her own magazine in September 1969, back when herds of comic magazines roamed the stands. Vampirella isn’t Barbarella’s long-lost sister, and she isn’t a real vampire. She’s a space alien who hails from the planet Drakulon, where blood is water. She comes to Earth on a rocket ship and finds employment as a horror hostess, a la the Crypt Keeper, telling lurid stories to twisted children.

How about a few examples? We meet Vampirella’s cousin, Evily, who in the course of doing evil throws a spell at a magic mirror, which reverses the spell and turns Evily good. Except she’s not really good, she’s just drawn that way. In the next issue Evily visits an enchanted tree, seeking – well, I’m not sure what she’s seeking – and then her body is turned to stone. At least I think that’s what happened. I’ve been reading comics for 48 years, and I’m not sure, so confusing me is quite the accomplishment right there.

How about the treasure seekers who try to steal Montezuma’s fabled treasure, guarded by the winged serpent Quetzalcoatl? The Big Q can possess anything with wings, so they shoot all the birds. And then it possesses a mosquito. At the end, we see the single survivor congratulating himself on escaping. Except he’s on an airplane, which has wings and transforms into Quetzalcoatl!

Then there’s the vampire who runs a movie studio and has his own version of the casting couch, which works until he meets a witch, who traps him inside a movie camera. Or maybe she transforms him into a movie camera? Or the caveman and cavewoman who flee an exploding volcano, overcome marauding dinosaurs, and meet their end when they mistake a dinosaur’s open mouth for a cave?

Sound dopey? Well, you’re right! These stories feature misspellings and muddled writing galore, but the best of them have an unpredictable energy. Unlike, say, Tales From the Crypt (which Vampirella is modeled on), the writers of Vampirella aren’t afraid to mix genres, with horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Vampirella’s origin story is science fiction, not horror.

A few words about the black-and-white art, which is the best part of this magazine. We have stories illustrated by artistic luminaries such as Neal Adams and Jose Gonzalez. Much of the art is cheesecake, sexy Venusians, barbarian queens, gill-women, vampires taking blood showers. In places, the illustrations remind me of Heavy Metal magazine. Recommended for fans of older horror comics and Tales from the Crypt anthology magazines.

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Fatale: Death Chases Me

Fatale: Death Chases Me, written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips, is a mash-up of noir and the supernatural. Think True Detective or Twin Peaks, although Fatale takes place in San Francisco and not the boonies. When I read this years ago, I didn’t like it quite as much as I did this time around. I didn’t understand that Jo is the main character, while also being the monster.

Let’s talk about Jo/Josephine, shall we? She doesn’t age and can enslave men to her will. She’s beautiful, sure, but there’s more to it than that. When she tells a man to put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, he does it without blinking. Jo doesn’t want this ability, nor can she control it. She thinks eye contact might be part of it, which makes sense. Jo can literally ruin lives at a glance.

Fatale takes place in the 1950’s in San Francisco, where Jo is being pursued by a group of cultists wearing red pjs. They are led by – I don’t know what it is. It seems urbane, if you can call a creature from Hell urbane. Whatever it is, it wants Jo. The cop she counted on for protection is now hopelessly corrupt, dying of cancer, and desperate enough to use her as a bargaining chip.

Many of the things Jo does are dicey. Witness the reporter who leaves his pregnant wife to do her bidding. When they have sex, she’s on top – this is a great character moment because the creators don’t make a big deal about it. He is her slave, and will do whatever she wants. There are consequences, because with Jo there are always consequences. The reporter’s pregnant wife is slain by the cult, and what happens to their unborn baby is even worse.

Jo isn’t a good person or a bad person. She is a survivor. She does what she has to, and leaves behind a trail of shattered men and broken marriages in her wake. Her so-called powers are a curse. She has transcended morality. She is what she is, the most beautiful monster you will ever see.

There are a lot of characters in Fatale. At first, I got a few of them confused. That is this graphic novel’s only weakness, if you can call it that – this is a series that rewards multiple reads. The ending leaves behind a few unresolved plot threads, but that’s okay as this is only the first arc of the series.

IMO, Fatale is the best thing Ed Brubaker has ever written. It is complemented by Sean Phillips’s gritty artwork, which features muted colors, lots of shadows, and eye-gouging monstrosities. Recommended for lovers of noir, supernatural comics, and monsters.

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Annihilation Omnibus: Drax the Destroyer

This is a review of the Drax the Destroyer miniseries, written by Keith Giffen with art by Mitch Breitweiser, which appears in the Annihilation Omnibus. The Annihilation storyline revitalized Marvel’s cosmic line, leading to the resurrection of titles like Guardians of the Galaxy and the resurgence of characters like Thanos, both of whom appeared in the movies Avengers: Infinity Wars and Avengers: Endgame. I won’t say that this is the miniseries that started it all, but it’s still a fine read.

Drax the Destroyer is Marvel’s cosmic version of The Hulk, big, green, and dumb. Drax survives an exploding spaceship taking him to prison, and ends up in Coot’s Bluff, Alaska, population 2816 – a number that is soon to plunge. I do not know why Drax is bound for prison. I am a comic junkie, and I do not even know Drax’s backstory. If you look up obscure Marvel characters in the dictionary, you will see Drax’s face. His history doesn’t matter, because the purpose of this miniseries is to serve as an introduction to characters appearing in Annihilation.

Besides Drax, there are four other survivors – a Skrull named Paibok, a blue alien named Lunatik, and the Blood Brothers, who are, uh, brothers. This group can be divided into those who are smart, Paibok; those who are smart and evil, Lunatik; and those who are stupid, The Blood Brothers and Drax. The Blood Brothers start a brawl with Drax while Paibok and Lunatik enter Coot’s Bluff, kill a bunch of locals, and organize the survivors into work gangs. They want to salvage the remains of the exploding spaceship and jury rig a ship so they can leave Earth, ASAP.

Paibok kills Drax. It takes him about five seconds. The Skrull is a soldier, and he uses his abilities like a soldier would. But don’t worry! Drax is resurrected, or perhaps he resurrects himself. There are hints Drax is evolving during his scuffle with The Blood Brothers – the longer the fight drags on, the smarter he gets.

Upon Drax’s resurrection, he psychically bonds with Cammie, a local. Cammie falls under the category of smart and evil. She’s ten, but has the world-weariness of a fifty-seven-year old cashier working full-time at McDonalds, which is to say she’s stuck and hates her life. The new Drax isn’t as strong as the dumb Drax, but he’s a thousand times more lethal. He has no qualms about killing and only fights when he needs to.

This reads more like an adventure or survival comic than a superhero story in that it is devoid of any sentimentality and features a sky-high body count. None of the characters – Drax included – act like superheroes. They act according to their self-interests. Drax doesn’t kill Paibok, because he has no reason to do so. In a way, Paibok did Drax a favor – because big, green, and dumb is no way to go through life. Recommended, especially for fans of Keith Giffen and Marvel’s Cosmic Line.

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Update on My WordPress Blog

Hello, everybody. I’m posting this to let everyone know I will be going back to the format of reviewing one graphic novel per week. If you want to know why, keep reading. Otherwise, see you Monday morning.

Last month, my viewership numbers plummeted because of a Google algorithm update. A number of my reviews went from being on the first page – sometimes the first result – to the equivalent of Google Siberia. SEO is important to my blog, because I am not a social media person. My work is my voice.

I do not have a huge readership, but my blog’s numbers were growing. The update wiped out almost three years of work in an instant. I decided to quit WordPress and started a Substack. And then a crawler went through my blog, and some of my reviews were hiked back up. My numbers are starting to improve.

I do not know why Google treats their content providers like this. I am providing free reviews on their platform, which people seem to enjoy. If you go on Bing – unfortunately, not many people do – many of my reviews are the first result. Thankfully, I do not depend on this blog as an income stream.

I will try to post reviews on both platforms, with my Substack containing the horror content and this blog providing comic content. And I guess we’ll see.

Here is the link to my Substack.

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Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume Eighteen

This is a review of Marvel Masterworks Daredevil Volume Eighteen, written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by various artists. Read my reviews of Volumes One, Two, and Three here, here, and here. Why, you may ask, did I switch from Volume Three to Volume Eighteen? Well, the third volume of Daredevil was so bad I didn’t want to read the fourth.  It happens, especially with 1960’s Marvel comics. For every classic issue of Spider-Man or The Fantastic Four, you have things like Matt’s imaginary twin brother Mike Murdock, evil landlord The Masked Marauder, and Daredevil trapped in a spaceship blasted into outer space by Electro.  Not all old comics are good.

However, these comics are good! Aside from the art – which is inconsistent – this is a very underrated run. The meat of the volume is Daredevil’s archnemesis Bullseye being shanghaied to Japan by disgraced kamikaze Lord Dark Wind, where his broken bones are replaced with metal implants. Ole Hornhead follows the trail to Japan, where he meets Yuriko, daughter of Lord Dark Wind, who helps him out.

Yuriko has a tattoo on her face, mainly because her father is crazy. After the Daredevil arc, she becomes Lady Deathstrike, courtesy of X-Men scribe Chris Claremont. I guess Claremont rescues her from obscurity, but she goes from a fleshed-out character to a psychotic cybernetic killing machine. Maybe aliens reversed her brain, because now she’s the opposite of how Denny O’Neil wrote her. But such is comics – they giveth, and they taketh away.

This volume also contains a bunch of one-shot issues. My favorite storyline is when Daredevil’s ex Heather Glenn gets drunk and reveals his secret identity at a party. Oopsie. Turns out the guy she spills the beans to is both terminally ill and running a murder squad, which happens. The Black Widow reappears in Matt’s life, and we catch a glimpse of Micah Synn, the Kraven the Hunter wannabe who will make his life miserable in the next volume. And I almost forgot about the guest appearance by Wolverine, everyone’s favorite killing machine!

Not many people recall Denny O’Neil’s Daredevil run, mostly because it’s sandwiched between two Frank Miller runs, but this is good stuff. O’Neil edited Miller’s first Daredevil run, which utilizes serialized storylines – multiple issues featuring recurring characters and a vivid setting – and uses the same techniques himself. Think James Robinson’s Starman and Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Recommended, especially for Daredevil fans.