Review: Vampirella versus the Superpowers #2
You would’ve thought that we would be done with multiverses and plural worlds by. After all, everything is cyclic. I guess this new seres of Vampirella versus the Superpowers owes as much to the previous run success as it does to Across the Spider-verse and The Flash. It seems you can’t keep a good alternative Earth story down.
Vampi and her sidekick, Dyna Might are undercover on Projection (aka another Earth) 1948. With such a designation you’d think we’d be in gangster land and you would be bang on right! Its the late forties where the the police are trying to curb the illegal use of “elixir”, with an eye on the celebrity and of course the mob, who may or may not be a natural! Think L.A. Confidential but with powers and smoking hot vampire and you will get the picture.
Dan Abnett continues to impress. Knowing that Vampi is too precious a commodity to Dynamite (the company not the sidekick) to actually face her demise, he has looked to use plural worlds as means to get us to care about others in the cast of characters, with Vampi being a sort of fulcrum. By doing so Abnett gets to flex his muscles in creating an energetic world where black is black and anything else is murky grey! The additional benefit of this approach is that we get characters who have natural sounding conversations about their world as Abnett takes a leaf out of the current X-books by including text pages that remove the need for the characters to exposition the life out of the reader. This keeps the book moving along at a fare pace despite the verbiage. At this stage with so many different Vampi’s running around in the recent past, I am not even going to hazard a guess at her personal continuity.
The art from Pasquale Qualano works well in the confines of the club, though falters at other times. Small things like the perspective of feet in heels bother me somewhat. You may remember seeing Qualano;s work on the DC vs Vampires books. It seems that he has picked up some of the Otto Schmidt’s tendencies. Overall, the look of the book suits the 40’s well; Vampi is both her own person and a moll in the same package. The colors provided by Ellie Wright have a darkness to them, which again suits the vibe of the book and the story that Abnett has penned. Jeff Eckleberry supplies the letters in a manner that ensures that the art shines through. With the raft of various variant covers, it is the homage of cover A that has the most charm.
I thought that this story of series of stories more precisely had ran its course. I am very pleased to see that I was wrong. This run, with Vampi on different worlds allows for the character to interact with a range of cast and environs. What more could a super hot vampire from another planet want?
Writing – 4.5 Stars
Art – 3.5 Stars
Colors – 4 Stars
Overall – 4 Stars
Written by; Dan Abnett
Art by; Pasquale Qualano
Colors by; Elie Wright
Letters by; Jeff Eckleberry
Cover A by; Jae Lee and June Chung
Author Profile
- I am a long time comic book fan, being first introduced to Batman in the mid to late 70's. This led to a appreciation of classic artists like Neal Adams and Jim Aparo. Moving through the decades that followed, I have a working knowledge of a huge raft of characters with a fondness for old school characters like JSA and The Shadow
Currently reading a slew of Bat Books, enjoying a mini Marvel revival, and the host of The Definative Crusade and Outside the Panels whilst also appearing on No-Prize Podcast on the Undercover Capes Podcast Network
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