Elvira’s needed to save the world again, this time with Vincent Price.
Creative Staff:
Story: David Avallone
Art: Juan Samu
Colors: Walter Pereyra
Letterer: Taylor Esposito, Elizabeth Sharland
What They Say:
Elvira is back, with her most historic AND greatest costar ever! The ghost of Vincent Price is a spirit with a mission, and only the Mistress of the Dark can help! The Apocalypse is coming, and it’s going to be live-streamed for binge-watching, but a long-lost movie can save the world… if only the movie star specter and the horror hostess with the mostest can find it in time! Thrills, chills, and all sorts of terrible puns!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Whenever I see an Elvira book these days, I just smile widely as it’s something that just works when everything in me tells me it shouldn’t. It takes a whole creative team to do it but the heart of it is David Avallone in cracking the code on how to make an Elvira story work with the particular kind of humor, story, and self-awareness. This miniseries is one that brings in some new artistic talent with Juan Samu and they deliver wonderfully here. Elvira herself looks great, wonderfully expressive and active, while doing a really good job in capturing Vincent Price and a number of different locales. It has a real lightness to it in some ways even though it’s a dark comical horror story, which lets Walter Pereyra really flex well here in the color design.
The premise here is that Elvira has run into a problem where she’s unable to get a new show greenlit at a number of streaming locations, such as Wholoop and Deathflix. She and her agent Eddie have reached a dead-end for now and she’s gone off to really drink herself silly over it. That, unsurprisingly, leads her to some really hilarious dreams where a mysterious person is trying to slice her in half only to have Vincent Price show up to save her. It has a lot of good classic bits to the whole sequence, and some midriff jokes that work well, but it segues into two things. Vincent Price really is trying to reach her through dreams and the person who was trying to kill her has now stolen her latest idea – and Eddie – for her own new project as Cleopatra, guiding new horror fans through the history of the genre.
While she ponders drinking further in order to cope (but knowing it’s bad), she realizes she’s definitely had enough when Vincent Prince speaks to her through a poster on her wall and then the movie she puts on with him. This gets her to invite him into her space and he reveals that he needs her help to track down an internet legend/myth that’s actually real and could destroy the world. It’s a simple but comical setup and Elvira has nothing else to do at the moment so we get a road trip with her and Vincent Price, the ghost whose appearance changes based on how her mind strays amid conversations to others. It’s a delight to see these two together and in reading it you can so easily hear both of their voices and the banter between them as being completely believable.
In Summary:
I never thought I’d get into Elvira comics a few years ago but, like the Bettie Page books that Dynamite puts out, I’m a huge cheerleader of them because they are absolutely fun and delightful. Avallone knows how to work this property in different ways and the addition of Price makes for a really delightful time with the dialogue, in-jokes, and obvious innuendo. Juan Samu’s artwork is fantastic here in how they capture both our leads and present the world so that there’s a good bit of comical to it but also a kind of sexiness that carries through. Combine that with some great settings and background pieces and it just comes together wonderfully. This is a somewhat standard but strong start to the new storyline that takes us further down Elvira’s path, which she’s happy to recount in brief along the way. Very recommended.
Grade: A-
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: August 4th, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
