Vampirella #11 // Review
A mad god wanted Ella to be his bride. When she refused, he ejected her from the gravity well he lives in. Whay would naturally come next? She ends up in the Old West dealing with cowboys and vampires in Vampirella #1. Writer Christopher Priest launches his heroine in a completely different direction with artist Ergün Gündüz. At first, it seems like a rather sudden jolt in a completely different direction that wasn't necessarily all that well for shadowed in previous issues. By issues and, Priest and company have more or less fully delivered on a very promising fusion between horror fiction and the cowboy western.
It's a perfectly normal southern cowboy town on the frontier. And people are settling in stolen land with strange fictions of some kind of gold in the hills. Vampirella hasn't found herself there adrift. Given how long she's lived and how many adventures she's been on, it's not exactly unwelcome. And it's not exactly territory that she hasn't been familiar with ensemble level or another. Naturally, they are going to be vampires in this particular section of the frontier. Naturally, she's going to have to deal with them. She might be meddling in the past. But those did say that she hadn't already done so?
Priest takes his time in setting up the basic premise. It's not a traditional cowboy story at all. There is more of a sympathetic eye being placed towards the natives. And more of a critical eye being placed towards race relations in the southwest on the frontier during the cowboy era. Intimate setting up his own personal relationship with the genre, Priest takes his time and setting up the basic premise for the conflict that's going to play out in this particular storyline. “4 Coffins” in Vampirella #11 becomes “400 Coffins” in issue #12.
Gündüz delivers equity and detailed cowboy story to the page. The Desert and decay of the southwestern frontier feels strikingly vivid. There's a lot going on in and around the edges of the action. A lot of very immersive visual reality. The fact that he's able to fuse it as well as he does with the traditional images of a.Vampirella comic book is actually kind of fun. To a certain extent the traditional Vampirella costume. Does look a little bit silly beneath us, Stetson in a duster. But somehow it just feels right. Somehow, it just works.
And so it ends up being a train heist. A train heist involving the delivery of 400 coffins which may or may not contain vampires. It's both silly and absurd, while also being very appealing as an action horror concept. It all fits together remarkably well. It all feels like it's doing something new with a couple of old genres that have been played out to death over the course of several decades in page and screen. It feels fresh and original, even though everything that's going on is more or less an echo of a echo of a copy of a copy of something that taken place somewhere else before.
