You don’t look so good. Have you Adventured into the Unknown lately? You know new studies show that people who Adventure into the Unknown at least once every two months have significantly lower risk of Leprosy and Typhoid Fever! Ha ha, can you guess I first wrote this NOT during a global pandemic that has claimed over six million lives to date and which my government is still doing fuck all to even TRY and stop!?
Buckle in, this is gonna be a long one.
Oh dang, the Avengers’ Robot turned into a Dracula?
“Science doesn’t deny that a person tortured by unspeakable horrors can sometimes flash a vivid image to a receptive mind!” Um, are you sure about that, comic? I think I’m gonna maybe go ask science to speak for itself on this one, cause that sounds like exactly the kind of thing that science denies all the time.
Congratulations to This Guy on winning the Worst Handgun User Ever 1951 award.
Gail Foster is just an ordinary suburban girl. Seven years ago her fiance disappeared in a plane over Transylvania, and she copes with her bereavement the same way any girl would: monologuing about her backstory to his photo and then listening to a record of his last known words.
We all grieve in our own way, I suppose.
She may be unusual, but she’s actually very well drawn. Seriously, the atmosphere in these two panels is really good, it’s dark, spooky, claustrophobic, and gives a genuine atmosphere of unknown menace gathering around her—look at the way her right arm sinks into the shadows in the second panel.
The rest of the story isn’t going to capitalize on this at all, but credit where credit is due.
Ok, I’m going to go through this step by step.
She sits down to listen to the record. This transitions to her having some kind of telepathic communication with him? A development which does not surprise her in the least.
She knows he’s in terrible danger. We don’t get told how she knows this, she just does, which is really convenient for the writer I suppose.
Apparently he’s hanging out with Vampira. Terrible Danger indeed! He’ll wind up cast in an Ed Wood film if he keeps doing that!
“They won’t let me say anything, except for this thing I’m saying right now, about how they won’t let me say anything!”
These vampires sure have a flair for the dramatic. But how did they know which angle her psychic vision was looking at him from?
She wakes up. And dashes my hopes that the colors being distorted and out of the lines was a deliberate effect to lend an air of unreality to the vision. It’s just a cheap printing error.
Ok, comic, you’ve gone pretty deep into the weeds here. I don’t know why she’s got psychic powers, and I get the impression that you don’t entirely know either. But I suppose that’s fair—you said right at the outset this was “Vampire Vision.” Well, here’s the vision, and there were the vampires. That’s fair.
And no sooner do I finish thinking THAT then THIS sequence starts happening.
She’s concentrating on his pilot wings to try and have another vision
First off… doesn’t he need those? To, you know, be a pilot? The thing he was doing when he crashed?
Second, far be it from me to question anyone else’s religious experiences, but you’re treating his old medal like a sacred relic, speaking aloud to him in an empty room, and are about to do some guided meditation to attempt to contact him spiritually. Gail, are you sure that Bill is your boyfriend and not your deity?
...whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?
Ok, so, let me see if I’ve got this straight. Vampires can teleport. Fair enough, every story that uses vampires changes up their powers, that’s fine. But it’s not just that: they can teleport via other people’s psychic visions.
Like, if Jean Grey and Professor X are having a mind conversation across state lines, and Blade was standing near Jean, but he really wanted a smoothie from this cafe next door to the Xavier school, he could just… hop through the mental link? Like go ‘excuse me, just wade through your thoughts here, Jean’ and Professor X is like ‘Blade, we’ve been over this! If you must jump through someone’s thoughts use Emma’s, she’s into that!’ Yes I know that sounds ridiculous, that is the point I am making because my only alternative is to just keep going whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat with progressively more A’s each time!
Well I will give you this much, comic, it’s certainly an original idea!
So this fellow—Dr. Ravpemi, yes aren’t we clever—is here to kill Gail because... maybe he should explain it.
Uh huh, go on.
Yeah, that was much better than having to type that myself.
I don’t know why BILL is so essential to this ‘dominate the world’ plan. What kind of supernatural vulnerabilities or strategic weak points could you have that ‘turning a World War II era airman into a vampire’ would address? But that’s the plan, and Gail is in the way with her Psychic Girlfriend-ness, so she’s got to be done away with!
Good thing that Bill’s medal, like all holy symbols, can be used to Turn Undead.
I’ll admit to still kinda loving the artwork here.
It's all I'm holding on to.
Was this story the artists's idea? There has to be some reason this much passion is going into it.
Well when you say it all out loud like that it just sounds silly!
Let me put it this way. If you need to take up this much of five whole panels with an explanation of what is going on in the story, then you’re working with material that is too dense for the book you are writing. You need to either simplify the story, or make the comic longer. Because the Emperor Hadrian is calling, he took one look at this text and he wants to know if we can send it to Scotland to keep out the Picts.
What.
So… she is compelled to drive up to a military airfield. She sees a plane glowing, a B-45, which is a military aircraft used in the Cold War, and just… decides to climb on in! Lady, I would have to go through hours of lines and security checkpoints and take off my shoes and throw away my toothpaste and that’s just to be a PASSENGER on a CIVILIAN DOMESTIC FLIGHT and you just decide to derp off to ANOTHER CONTINENT with a military plane that carries weapons of mass destruction in the middle of the cold war because Holy Saint Boyfriend sent a magic glow that only you can see!?
Are you prepared to explain that in front of a court martial? Or at the Hague? I wouldn’t be!
But it’s all ok, because Bill is guiding her! She’s a member of the Church of Bill Christ of Latter Day Gails!
Her Bill, who art in Transylvania, fiance be thy name. Thy airplane come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in psychic visions. Give her this night her nightly flight instructions, and forgive this comic because fuck does it need it. And lead her not into an international incident, but deliver her from spinsterhood.
The Morticia Adams looking lady is Zara, the head Vampire who’s been trying to hypnotize and brainwash Bill into being a vampire for seven years. Can I just say that I don’t see the appeal of this guy? I guess he’s handsome enough in a Chris Evans sort of way. But is he worth spending seven years of vampire mind control effort on? Worth committing a felony and flying solo across the Atlantic for? Ladies, you can BOTH do better, please believe me when I say there are other guys out there!
And Bill? You’re talking to someone who’s never flown before, who’s never been to Europe before, and who is flying over comic book Transylvania, where ‘Big joint with towers’ describes nearly every building, with a plane full of bombs. You’re going to have to be more specific.
Bill’s words are apparently literally the thing keeping the plane aloft, so she parachutes out. In Bill’s name, which it is her blessed hope to one day share, amen.
And you thought all my jokes about Bill being her religion were just that? Nope! It’s right there in the text! What even is this comic?!
Two human skeletons with their limbs bent in the form of huge bats, you say? Boy, that sure would be a compelling final image for your comic. But no, have someone describe it to us, instead, that’s just as good.
The Vampire Vision is an insane, incoherent, indescribable mess of a comic. Vampires can turn you into a vampire by hypnotizing you into deciding to be a vampire. People just have psychic visions. Vampires can travel via said psychic visions. Bill is some kinda messiah or something apparently. Military aircraft are just lying around available for convenient pickup. I had to suspend so much disbelief that I could dry laundry on it, and that still wasn’t enough to get through this comic!
There’s still so many unanswered questions here, like—Is Gail telepathic? Or is Bill? If it’s Bill is that why he was so integral to the vampire’s world conquest plan? Or could they have done this with any airman, and they just had the bad luck to pick the one who happened to have a girlfriend who is both psychic AND willing to carry a torch for seven years?
It’s got some really strange gender politics going on: Gail is very much the main character, everything that happens in the story is because of a decision she made, she not only saves herself she saves her male love interest. But not a single panel goes by without her talking about Bill, worrying about Bill, and asking Bill to tell her what do with quasi-religious fervor. Meanwhile Zara’s psychic attack on Bill is expressed almost entirely in erotic terms, such that his remaining human and foiling the villains are both directly dependent on his faithfulness to Gail. A full-on Freudian or Feminist critic could probably get a whole dissertation out of this.
The art is surprisingly good. Every page has at least one panel that stands out with clever use of panels, inspired shading, or amazing framing. Yet the printing errors—the sloppy coloring especially—ruin so much of that.
I could have seen this story working, honestly, in another format—like if this was a long, rambling, moody manga/anime? Then the weird vampires, the psychic powers, the lackadaisical military, the causal, consequence-free lawbreaking, the unsettling, categorization-defying devotion that Gail has toward Bill, those would all fit comfortably into genre expectations, wouldn’t they? If I close my eyes I can almost see the Yoshitaka Amano cover art in my head. As if in some kind of…
Vision…
...of a Vampire.