Zombos Says: Good
I'm not a big fan of artists who draw people with the same facial features, slightly altered, for every non-masked character, and who fill panels with heavy dark lines and even darker spaces. Remember the big-head makeup artist on Face-Off? He bored the judges because his makeups kept reverting to big-headed sculpts, so they looked the same. I was bored with Admira Wijaya and Daniel Sampere's art in the same way: too dark, obscuring detail without lending depth to the scene, and everybody looks like a cousin to everyone else. Except for Batman and Batgirl; they have masks.
What they also have is the same tired fists-and- wisecracks response in the face of supernatural catastrophe. Even John Constantine seemed bored by it all. Peter Milligan's dialog and story flow was like every DC Comic issue where "real" superheroes hook up with the occult fringe: predictable encounters filled with quips from caped crusaders who are out of their element, and the eventual reliance on some astral zones-worth of cosmic assistance, given with a brief show of reluctance, leading to ambiguous results (you know, the cop-out ending).
Did I mention I'm pretty bored by all this nonsense by now? At this point I'm thinking What's all this "next comic to sink your teeth into" BS from IGN quoted on the cover? When I turned to Fialkov's and Andrea Sorrentino's issues contained in this second volume, I got it. My recommendation is to breeze through the Justice League Dard issues, 7 and 8, and focus on the real deal, I, Vampire issues 7 through 12.
I reviewed the first issue of I, Vampire favorably because of Fialkov and Sorrentino's efforts, and these later issues headed by them show more maturity in the execution of characters, the panel-world around them, and the sticky situations they antagonize. After Cain works up all those vampires into a feeding, bleeding frenzy, shifting gears on them by moving them from Gotham City to Utah to go cold-turkey does provide enough tension to spill over into bedlam soon enough. The Van Helsings show up for a fight and they've got a nifty new tactic: resurrection. Andrew Bennett's shell-shocked sidekicks get in on the action, with the usual "more than they bargained for" portion of hurt. And even Mary, Queen of Blood, faces a new challenge.
This New 52 version of the House of Mystery's I...Vampire shifts the storyline to vampires who can stand in the sunlight, but are weaker for it, and have the ferocity of those blood-suckers in 30 Days of Night. Andrew Bennett is also much older, though youthful in appearance (as is everyone in the New 52 Universe). This series is ending in April with I, Vampire issue 19, so look for volume 3 soon thereafter.
A courtesy copy was provided for this review from the publisher.
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