Zombos Says: Good
Adapting Dan Curtis’s television series Dark Shadows to the comic book format has been done before. There was also a nationally syndicated newspaper strip that ran in the early 1970s, but it ended when the show was canceled. Old vampires are especially hard to kill, though, and perhaps that is why Barnabus Collins, who became one in 1795, keeps coming back.
The good thing about Marc Andreyco and Guiu Vilanova’s Dark Shadows: Year One is how it stays true to the original storyline and fated characters (episodes 365 to 461 of the televised series). The bad thing is how it doesn’t add any new life to the gothic storyline or, at least, fully embrace its melodramatic nuances of soap opera horror through buildup and suspense.
Given today’s comic book page-squeezing and insistence on 4 and 6 issue story arcs, Dark Shadows: Year One, flies by faster than a bat, leaving die-hard fans to reminisce and add their emotional pacing and buildup for each hurried-through event in this 6 issue compilation, thereby appropriately smoothing out the well-remembered drama for them. Newcomers to Dark Shadows may not be so obliging. They will only know the story as written and drawn, and the impact this venerable dark and brooding soap opera tragedy might have been able to deliver is lessened considerably. Unless, and heaven forbid, they’ve just come from a screening of Tim Burton’s flaky pastry of tragic but cheeky incoherence. All bets are off if that’s the case.
Where’s the deeper rub as jilted Angelique foils the dreams of Barnabus Collins and dooms him and his family? Angelique Bouchard Collins: witch; what a rich backstory to be told, yet we still wait to read it and see it. Easily one full issue there, in her growth into witchdom, or even an entire four parter in itself.