Vampirella #10 // Review
He might be calling himself Chaos. He thinks of himself as a god. She’s telling him that he isn’t. At best, he’s a deranged sentient energy field trapped inside a gravity well with a god complex. The fact that she’s saying this while serving as the unwilling maidenhead of a boat that he’s helming in 1616 is only a strange detail. She’s about to break the prow of the ship and face her captor in Vampirella #10. Writer Christopher Priest continues a weirdly fun and compellingly frenetic tale of horror fantasy that is brought to page and panel by artist Davis Goetten and colorist Adriano Augusto.
Then it’s the year 3188. Kala Lumpur. Vampirella is yelling at Chaos to stop what it’s doing. And though she may have a very powerful and fundamental understanding of some basic metaphysics of the situation, she doesn’t understand it on a fundamental level. She asks it: “What’s the point of all of this?!” She’s being attacked an Elvis, a Roman centurion and a demon at the time. And all that her opponent can answer is that “Chaos is an end unto itself.” There’s no reason. There’s only the strange aggressive formlessness that continues to attack.
The fact that Chaos keeps referring to Vampirella as its bride is an added, little. bit of weirdness that maintains the overall energy of everything quite impressively. The high weirdness that’s a mix between fantasy, science fiction, horror and comedy spills like poetry out of Priest’s dialogue in a way that suggests that there might be some kind of bigger, grander design beyond it all. But honestly...there doesn’t have to be. It’s all so pleasantly absurd as brutal attacks spill out across the page and semi-philosophical words cascade through dialogue balloons as the heroine tries to figure out what the hell is going on. It’s fun.
A script like the one that Priest is working with can be very, very difficult to maintain any kind of visual coherence. Goetten maintains a solid hold on the emotions that keep everything grounded. There’s a bit of a stillness about the action that can be a little bit frustrating at times in places, but the visuals work overall nonetheless. Whether its aggression or passion or nuanced emotion, Goetten always manages to find away around making it totally work on the page. Not that there’s a clear intention of doing that...just that it always manages to be something less than satisfying while still maintaining an overall entertaining presence on the page. Augusto’s colors give the isue a solid sense of atmosphere that’s maintained through all of the weirdness and honestly might be the one thing that’s truly holding all of the elements of the issue together.
Priest is clearly doing something here. And it might be difficult to tell quite exactly what it is that that is, but it continues to be kind of fun trying to figure out where it’s all going. If nothing else, Vampirella maintains a great deal of appeal as a character...constantly being thrown through the chaos and still coming out fighting on the other side of every issue.
