REVIEW: Carmilla Volume 2: The Last Vampire Hunter

Culture Shock

Carmilla The Last Vampire Hunter 2 is the most interesting comic I’ve read in quite a while, but that’s largely due to its large page count, coming in at a whopping hundred and fourteen pages. It’s a refreshing change from the biweekly thirty-page cape books that only deliver a fraction of a story. So, if you’ll forgive the vampire pun, there’s plenty to sink my teeth into here.

Carmilla comes to us from the minds of writer Amy Chu and artist Soo Lee, who imbue their vampire tale with a large heaping of Asian folklore and theming. Our story opens with a girl returning to her childhood home of San Francisco. Athena Lo, the last in a long line of vampire hunters heading out to the big city with nothing more than a family photo and her grandfather’s diary. Her quest leads her into an encounter against some vampires prowling the streets of Chinatown, and she wastes no time showing us the skills of her bloodline by smashing open a wooden crate snapping off a board and using it to steak some undead scum.

Her battle comes to a head when a werewolf appears, something she isn’t prepared for, only to be saved by an extremely powerful vampire who decides the best course of action is to smash the mutt’s head in. Athena is taken into captivity, and it’s here the book gets interesting. After the exposition we learn a vampire frozen in time at just ten years of age is actually her older brother. He’s running a crew of diverse vampires inspired by different Asian myths and legends, from women with the lower bodies of serpents to Filipino vampires that can detach their heads. These uncommon, often overlooked vampire subtypes are something that makes the background characters of Camilla feel unique to the pale skin and fangs of their Hollywood counterparts.

Structure and Sinew

While the dialogue works and the story structure is there, it’s not a particularly solid one. For starters, for a vampire slayer, we only really see Athena fight once over the hundred-plus pages. She isn’t even the one to vanquish her evil brother. That honour went to a vampire she befriends. On the topic of Athena’s brother, there’s all this talk about how he’s going to kill everybody and take out the world and all other vampires, but I just don’t buy him as that big of a threat. The choice to have him stuck in the body of a ten-year-old could have been an interesting choice, but they don’t really play with it enough to make it a big enough part of his persona. Instead, it works against his character, making him seem immature, winey, and non-threatening.

At the tail end of the story, Athena promises to help a vampire find his descendants, and it just so happens to be the woman working at the hostel who is helping our hero; it’s far too convenient and rather lazy writing to earn the emotional payoff the ending sacrifice tries to evoke.

Volume One
If this book did one thing well it made me intrigued about the title character. There’s a scene in this book where we meet with Carmilla, who has seemingly reformed and taken up a life of peace and meditation, residing at a monastery a little out of town. However, the Queen of Vampires has a twisted sense of reality and has killed the other monks so she could have more ‘quiet’ for her meditation. The way Carmilla is written is both commanding and chilling, and this is meant to be a somewhat remorseful or defeated enemy, so imagining what she was like as the main antagonist has me intrigued. I’ll be reading volume one for myself soon enough to see if part one has the bite this volume sorely lacks.

“Skip this and read volume one instead.”

FINAL SCORE

2/5 STARS

PUBLISHER: Dark Horse Comics
WRITER: Amy Chu
ART: Soo Lee