A collecting of Vampirella’s continues.
Creative Staff:
Story: Thomas Sniegoski, Jeannine Acheson
Art: Daniel Maine
Colors: Francesca Cittarelli
Letterer: Taylor Esposito
What They Say:
With Book as her captive, Bloodwing continues to murder Vampirellas across the different realities, searching for the missing pages of the Book of Prophecy in her twisted quest to find and destroy the Artist. Meanwhile, Vampirella and her sisters of Draculon do battle during the Stone Age against an ancient tribe of Chaos demons before beginning their journey to save all reality. This penultimate issue of VampiVerse has it all—death, destruction and more Vampirellas than you can shake a stick at! You don’t want to miss this one!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Thomas Sniegoski and Jeannine Acheson worked a lot of things into the opening rounds of this series with the setup and then showed a few different timelines and how they operate, which gives us an insight into different kinds of Vampirella’s. The last issue had things feeling like they were coming together better as time went on and it “made” more sense with all the progression so that you could get a handle on it. Daniel Maine continues to be a solid and strong artist with some really good layouts to be had here, though I think he can really try being even more creative as time goes on with this book. The characters look great and Francesca Cittarelli does a great job of taking his work to the next level with its color design.
The opening story for this takes us to an alternate world in the 1940s where the Chaos Army is the big thing causing destruction around the world. Done up in similar Nazi-style designs, we see an incident where Vampirella, known as Invisirella here because she’s invisible, is a secret agent operating there. It’s a fun little detour that brings her into Bloodwing’s orbit and then shifts gears to the group that has coalesced to fight Bloodwing to deal with events in a dinosaur era period where the Vesper ship is. This just gives us the silliness of a range of Vampirella types going up against dinos and getting a handle on the ship itself as they’re heading to what may be the final confrontation with Bloodwing. It’s all very straightforward, maybe a little too much so at times, but accomplishes its goals of delivering some personality for each of them and bringing them to the big conflict.
With Bloodwing, she’s made her conquests pretty easily here and is now preparing for her next avenue in trying to deal with the artist. We do see some of this in the real world with an elderly woman that’s close to dying it seems and dreaming these characters, so there aren’t any real surprises there about all of this. Within the story, we see Bloodwing making a big assault on the Library where the Libriellas are all fierce valkyrie-types that are defending the books written and unwritten. It’s not something we see a ton of and you’re left to imagine it more than anything else, but we get an interesting tease with it here that makes it clear that Bloodwing is on a real tear in going through the realities and what she’s after to deal with the person behind all of it.
In Summary:
Vampiverse is a bit of a quick read because a lot of it is pretty similar to the recent issues of it. The structure is the same but I do like the 1940s trappings we get and it’s fun to see this cast work through the dinosaur part of it. Bloodwing still doesn’t have enough meat on the bones to be a compelling villain because the motivation is so basic and there’s nothing to them beyond that. That said, it is a fun read and Daniel Maine delivers a ton of gorgeous pages throughout that makes you want to see more of their work handling the character in a less crowded situation and with a bit more creepiness to it. There’s plenty to like here overall but I keep wishing there was something a bit stronger about it overall.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: January 12th, 2022
MSRP: $3.99
