A new darkness is moving through the streets for Vampirella and Evily to take care of.
Creative Staff:
Story: Kristina Deak-Linsner
Art: Joseph Michael Linsner
Colors: Ceci de la Cruz
Letterer: Jeff Eckleberry
What They Say:
Vampirella hunts down a sexual predator in order to feed her insatiable thirst for blood. While tracking him down to a Philadelphia nightclub, Evily the Witch bars her path. They clash and the plan is thwarted. Do they both decide to team up against him, or remain at odds? Whatever the means, Vampi vows to get revenge!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With the recent ongoing series for Vampirella wrapping up and a kind of uncertainty as to where to go next, I was interested to see what this miniseries would be like. At the same time I was also apprehensive as the previous project Joseph Michael Linsner worked on didn’t come together too well and had a lot of delays. This one has him solely on the art duties and with Kristina Deak-Linsner writing it so I’m a bit more hopeful with the end result. I believe this is his first formal writing work for comics as I didn’t find anything else in most of the usual databases but she definitely handles it well and it has a pretty good flow about it as we get the setup underway.
This miniseries is certainly fun from the start as it brings Evily into it, a character little used over the nearly fifty years since her own introduction into the Vampirella mythos. Here, she’s been spending the last few weeks tracking down a man that sexually assaulted a girl named Clare but has had a hard time getting him into a place to deal with him. Clare’s in a bad place in the hospital from it and there’s certainly an element of revenge with what Clare wants to do. At the same time, Vampirella has come into town and ends up in a bar where she meets up with the same guy and, it turns out, has been tracking him for a few months as he’s moved from place to place. It’s amusing watching Vampi essentially pick him up at the place and getting him where she wants him to be only to have Evily mess everything up as it turns into a fight between them instead.
This is, admittedly, a standard kind of introductory piece where it then gives the leads a choice of either working together and trusting each other or working separately and causing problems along the way. I do like how the two basically work things out between each other after the initial fight and we get some minor background on them so that they’re on the same page while also not revealing, obviously, a huge amount of history that exists. Linsner’s artwork for this is pretty good as it doesn’t feel quite as stilted and pose-y as some of his past works were to me and the coloring side of it feels so much brighter and slicker than usual which helps a lot. It may not be the black and white detail that draws the most attention to his style we usually see with prints and some of the older works with limited color but it has a really neat feeling that works here.
In Summary:
While I’ll have a bit of wariness about this series based on past experience and uncertainty based on the accelerated schedule I’m seeing on retail sites, the opening installment of this book is pretty fun. Evily’s a rare-use kind of character that I’ve not seen often so it’s a welcome thing to see her here and she feels idea for the Linsner’s to work with. The setup is a bit standard but it avoids overdoing the problems that could exist between the two and focusing on what they can do together to deal with a really problematic person. It’s a smooth and solid read with some really fun artwork, a classic Vampi costume, and some good old fashioned silliness as well. I’m hopeful that it’ll all deliver right over the course of it as Vampi’s going into her 50th anniversary next year and deserves a lot of good stuff.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: June 27th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
