Vampirella Helliday Special 2025 // Review
Snowman Steve is a vampire. He’s turned some of the adorable Christmas Critters n the North Pole into vampires as well. It’s an ugly situation that’s only going to get worse without a Christmas. Someone is going to need to step-in to solve the problem, but it’s definitely NOT going to be a vampire hooker. It’s going to be the Vampirella Helliday Special 2025. Writer Frank Tieri and artist Mariano Benitez Chapo tell a twisted holiday tale with colorist Jorge Sutil. It’s a pleasantly irreverent holiday action comedy that never takes itself too seriously. Nothin too terribly deep here, but there is a bit of fun.
Vampirella is hanging out in New York when they come for her. With no more Christmas, she’s able to get a lot of merchandise at a steal. So many places are going out of business that it’s a buyer’s market everywhere. Everything seems to be going quite well on her walk back home when she gets hit in the head with a pumpkin. She turns around to see badass representatives from Halloween, Thanksgiving, Groundhog Day and St. Patrick’s Day are there to bring her in. They’re there to ask for her help getting Santa Claus back to the North Pole...
Tieri’s script almost seems to be trying to march the fun onto the page at gunpoint. It would be a lot more fun if it weren’t so...forced. The overt attempt at making things shocking and irreverent feels a bit too over-worked to feel anything other than...cringey. Holiday sentiment is SO formal and conservative on so many levels. It really doesn’t take much work at all to make an irreverent stab at it. A more nuanced approach to prodding the holiday traditions would theoretically leave a hell of a lot of room for something far more sophisticated than what Tieri is trying here.
Benitez-Chapo does his best to keep up with the extreme silliness of Tieri’s script. It’s not an easy task. The cartoonishness of it feels like the wrong approach. A more serious rendering of the silliness would have created a much more clever contrast between the script and the subject matter. A naked Santa on a stripper pole, for instance, would have had a great deal more impact if it was done in the style of the lovable, old nostalgic bits of Coca-Cola iconography that made Santa what he is today.
It’s light, forgettable fun that plays with traditional holiday tropes. There isn’t much here, but what IS here is pretty fun in places even if it seems largely uninspired and predictable. Vampirella is cool regardless of hte situation, so it’s hard to hate a book that features her so prominently next to so many beloved holiday characters. It would be a lot easier to take the inconsequential silliness of it all if it weren’t. for the fact that the premise really DOES have a lot of potential in and around the edges of everything.
