Vampirella #671 // Review
55 years from now, Jim Amanda and Katie are in the hall of a private school in Huntington Park California. They’re arguing over a world that’s been created. Then it’s 1969. The Bronx. A Greyhare bus is stopped by some kind of monster--a chupacabra. The only one who can stop it is a bit mixed-up. It’s going to be a big mess for everyone involved in Vampirella #671. Writer Christopher Priest continues a trippy cross-time story with artist Iván F. Silva and colorist Werner Sanchez. It’s a weird mess of a non-linear story, but Priest and company keep it entertaining throughout.
Sometime later (but WAY before the conversation in Huntington Park) Vampirella is trying to have a conversation with the guy who is letting her use his shower. She says she’s a vampire from another planet. Naturally, he’s going to think that she’s crazy, but it’s not like he didn’t just run into a chupacabra, so it’s really more of a matter of opinion as to WHAT is going on. She seems to know, though. She seems all too confident. She should be: she created the world 55 years from now when she was 12. Now it’s the past and she’s much older and more experienced.
Aside from being really, really excessively weird, there really IS a kind of weighty reality that Priest is bringing to the page. This is absolutely necessary as any single issue in Priest’s current run doesn’t make a damned bit of sense. It’s a hell of a difficult thing to try to make it all seem very, very real to the characters without really cluing the reader-in on what the hell it is that’s going on. Priest is managing quite a bit of depth from everything in a way that doesn’t necessarily have to make sense on a larger scale. It’s weird, but it works.
The contrast between words is delivered in contrasting styles. Silva is delivering SOME of the rarity of this on his own, but a lot of it comes in the form of the color that Sanchez is and isn’t bringing to the page depending on the setting. That which lies in the past in the world she created is in black-and-white. That which isn’t (perhaps) is in color in California 55 years from now. The action feels a bit stiff on the page, but there’s a definitely classy moodiness about the whole thing that feels suitably cool on a whole bunch of different levels.
Given enough time, Priest could really be developing something phenomenal here and it would be very, very cool. Seen on an issue-to-issue level, it’s almost completely unintelligible but for the intensity of what is indelibly real for the people going through it in and within the scenes. Priest and company of a good job of selling that much, though...which makes it well worth the rad. It’s challenging stuff...but it’s still kind of difficult to tell whether or not Priest’s story will be worth the challenge.
