Die!namite: Blood Red #2 // Review
Vampirella has een sommuned by the demon named Purgatori.It’s not exactly a very happy connection between the two of them. Can’t stand each other really, but Purgatori needs Vampirella’s help and she isn’t exactly in a position to try to ignore the summons of someone as powerful as Purgatori. Evidently the demon has intercepted another woman from off-world and the demon thinks that Vampirella might be able to speak to her. Of course, she can’t but that’s not going to make anything any easier for her in Die!namite: Blood Red #2. Writer Fred Ven Lente and artist Marco Finnegan contine a Dynamite Comics zombie apocalypse mash-up with colorist Ellie Wright.
The other offworlder is a beautiful woman with red sin. She knows how to speak English, but she isn’t going to let Purgatori know about it until she’s cetain that she’s going to be able to get hlp. See: the red-skinned off-worlder in question is Dejah Thoris of Mars. Theres a good chance that the zombie outbreak might be a biological agent engineered in labs on Mars and she thinks that she might be able to find a cure if she can get some help from the right people....
There’s a cleverly-orchestrated approach to the mega-crossover series that does a remarkable job of delivering something far more provocative than a big slugfest between various dark heroes and anti-heroes. It’s a deft blending all of the characters that respects each one of them and their distinct personalities. There’s a sharp sense of complexity about the different dramatic elements at work frrom every edge of the ensemble. The writer is doing a lot more than slapping together a bunch of badasses from Dynamite Comics just to see whats’ going to happen.
Finnegan centers the art squarely on the characters. There isn’t a whole lot of atmsphere that goes beyond the interpersonal drama. The fact hat the rdrama in question happens to be going on between an assassin, an alien vampire, a psychic woman from Mars and so on...tHAT’s what makes it visually interesting. And there may not be a whole lot of dramatic complexity drawn into the page in the form of thoguhtful nance, but Finnegan DOES make it all look very, very good from beginning to end. It’s stylish stuff that’s made all the more appealing by Wright’s sumptuous color work.
The size of the ensemble in a book like this really runs the risk of making it all feel a bit too cluttered, but the creative team really finds a way to pace it all that manages an impressive amount of balance for a cast that is as complex and diverse as the one that’s appearing between the covers of Blood Red. It would be difficult to make something like this work in the long run with out characters and. conflicts crashing into each other, but the overall feel of this series is one that inspires confidence in something that might strikingly well-articulated by the time it hits its final panel.
