So very 90s.
Creative Staff:
Story: Max Bemis
Art: Roberto Castro, Marcos Ramos
Colors: Andrew Dalhouse, Dinei Ribeiro
Letterer: Carlos M. Mangual
What They Say:
Ah, the ‘90s, our strange yet dynamic link between the excess of the ‘80s and the pretentiousness of the aughts. A time when heroes were born, died, and were reborn (again). Amidst all that creative chaos, the form of comics was torn between the muscle-bound proliferation of All Things Pouch and the heady brew offered up by the British Comics Invasion.
Now, in the long-ago year of 1992, VAMPIRELLA finds herself a vampire trapped between not just two worlds but two genres! When a “bad girl model” hired to portray Vampy at conventions and signings is plunged into a terrorist incident, she’s forced to face not just men with nunchucks before her, but the insidious forces roiling beneath the surface of geek culture… and her own dark past.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With a lot of variety to the types of books we get for top-tier characters Dynamite works with such as Vampirella, Red Sonja, and more, I like to see where they go with them and to try and do new things in these one-shots or miniseries. Vampirella gets a lot of the attention for obvious reasons and going back to the 90s style with her is certainly something fun to do. Max Bemis has definitely caught my eye with several projects of his over the last few years – I’m still weirdly in awe of his Centipede series – so I was curious to see how this would go. Working with Roberto Castro and Marcos Ramos only made it a given that the book would look great and it really works across the different styles it wants to engage with here, from the obvious fanservice to the grimy stuff to the more straightforward 90s era material.
The premise for this introduces us to Tawni as she’s been hired along with a few other regular friends that go to conventions and do all the posing in minimal comic book costumes, i.e. the Vampirella, Red Sonja, Puragtori kind of thing. The girls are all fun and silly about it and there’s some far too blunt dialogue about things that just comes across unnaturally about how being a lesbian in the 90s is cool considered to a decade earlier. It’s just such an unnatural line and there are a lot of those throughout this. The trio are fun together overall but everything then just devolves into all the reasons that people view conventions badly with it full of guys mainsplaining or just ogling the women wearing next to nothing. It’s a mess of what it’s trying to present because there were conventions like that to be sure but there were plenty of “regular” conventions where the runners didn’t hire models to drive attendance.
There are also some bad guys that are involved in all of this as they have their own thing going where they cause trouble on corporate properties because that’s where the money is in manipulating real-estate prices and the like. That turns things into a small bloodbath of sorts but what it really does is to get Tawni to reveal that she’s been Vampirella all this time but has just been trying to go incognito in order to live a normal life and keep all the supernatural stuff on the down-low. Of course, once she gets a taste of blood, she wants a whole lot more. And that leads to more chaos, but it never really comes together because the dark and brooding bad guys never connect and the situation as a whole just feels forced, unfortunately. It’s the kind of piece where I can see where Bemis was going and the way it hits the nostalgia, but at the same time the opposing side that causes all the real trouble just never becomes interesting and felt out of place.
In Summary:
I’m always game for a little trip down nostalgia lane but this Vampirella 1992 one-shot felt like it was of two worlds and neither one worked well with the other. Bemis has some good stuff in the mix here and playing the hired models things certainly worked well since it let them draw in a few other fun players. But when it came to giving is something to play against, it just doesn’t work as the villains are alternatively too goofy and too grim and the fine line of figuring out how to make it work is simply wobbled all over like a bad test alongside a highway. There are a lot of neat moments but this is more towards completionists and those that want every Vampirella appearance out there. I’d love to see Castro work on her more on interiors, however.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: June 2nd, 2021
MSRP: $4.99
