Vampirella #7 // Review
There’s a vampire sunning herself on the coast of the British Virgin Islands. Might not make a whole lot of sense to traditional vampire lore, but she isn’t exactly a traditional vampire. She’s from the planet Drakulon. She’s been injured and she’s resting. There’s someone there who has been waiting for her. A stranger. She may be in great trouble in Vampirella #7. Writer Christopher Priest continues a very dense narrative with artist Davis Goette and colorist Adriano Augusto. Though it’s pretty heavily buried into the midst of the Vampirella mythology, Priest and company manage to develop a remarkably engrossing chapter of a long-running series.
The stranger is wearing an exotic-looking suit of what appears to a powered armor of some sort. And then she’s not. And then she’s kissing her. And then things get pretty passionate from there. After a bit of intimacy, Vampirella tells the stranger that she knows she’s not human. Humans smell like bacon. The stranger smells like tofu. And then there are all the drones that have been hovering around. She figures that the stranger will explain them as well. Before she can do that, though, she’s going to explain that she’s an algorithm that happens to know that Vampirella is a pansexual. It’s, “in her file.”
Priest hasn’t been terribly interested in explaining the story to the readers. He’s got way to much story to deliver on the page to bother with a whole lot of explanation. The narrative has places to go and things to do and the reader is along for the ride. This is preferable to a lot of fantasy and fantasy horror fiction which seems to be absolutely DARING the reader to read it. Priest lets the reader in on just enough story to make it all appealing.
Goette delivers the action with a sharp sense of perspective and balance. The actual rendering can feel pretty heavy-handed n places with thickly-rendered lines that feel more than a little bit brutal when it could be at least a little bit more elegant. That being said, the overall look of it ends up being quite well-executed with Augusto’s colors adding considerable depth and luminosity to the visuals. It all hits the page with the right amount of force throughout. Priest’s script requires a great deal of nuance in order for it to make any sense at all and the art team sculpts that nuance with a clever poise.
The narrative jumps around a lot...from a rural farm in Kansas in the middle of the day to the deep twilight of the Virgin Islands and back again to a flight of demon things at an international airport. It is a great credit to Priest and the art team that it all feels as fluid as it is throughout the story. It’s remarkably sharp stuff from beginning to end even though it isn’t all that clear quite what the significance of every single moment might exactly be.
