Draculina: Blood Simple #4 // Review
There’s a girl who is slapping a candle, trying to get it to start. The rat on her shoulder tells her that it’s not going to work. She’s a bit too lost to listen to it OR the cars that are honking at her in the night. (This is all happening in the middle of a crosswalk.) She’s trying to save a suicidal girl. It’s a lot more complicated than it seems in Draculina: Blood Simple #4. Writer Christopher Priest continues a story that is conjured for the page by artist Michael Sta. Maria. Color comes to the page courtesy of Ivan Nunes.
There’s a water demon that’s pursuing her. He’s a big blue guy in a trench coat with a fin on top of his head. He’s older than her. More experienced. He’s going to string her up over the Santa Monica Pier and ask her some questions. It’s just a casual conversation, really. Meanwhile, Draculina and Vampirella have a few things to discuss while they’re on the run through a series of nightmare realms. They keep changing form as one world becomes the next...ever-so-subtly, but with MAJOR repercussions that seem to flit from moment to moment in a chaotic mess of instability.
Priest does a sharply clever job of articulating the bewildering complexity of life between alternate dimensions. The hell of other people gets particularly complicated when magic and extra-dimensional demons are involved. Draculina and Vampirella tumble through time in the midst of a complicated conversation about their mutual pasts. Everything collides as they try to understand everything at various ages, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, in the midst of the world blowing up around them...and through it all, Priest manages some very clever dialogue. The collision that’s going on in the surface of the issue is only a fraction of what’s actually going on. Judging from how things are moving in the foreground, Priest has a meticulous understanding of everything else going on in Draculina’s world.
The script is dense in places. Lots of characters are being juggled around from various ends of the Vampirella universe. The constant shiftings of scene and tone would be really, really difficult to grasp visually were it not for the fact that Michael Sta. Maria does SUCH a brilliant job of delivering the complexity of the drama to the page. What’s more...differences in age from one scene to the next between Draculina and Vampirella would be a headache for any artist, but Michael Sta. Maria handles the subtleties and nuances of the two characters with deft and heartfelt precision.
It’s dense, complex fun that has to do with devils and demons and things. Compare the emotional complexity of this with a longer-running series like Spawn, and it feels positively brilliant by comparison. Spawn is also dealing with very direct conflicts between angels and demons, and it isn’t anywhere NEAR as engaging as what Priest is bringing to the page in Draculina.
