This comic was WAAAAYYYYY better than that title lead me to believe. A series of simple yet evocative portraits of three vampire women, accompanied by prose just this side of hyperbolic that captures the particular views of each on the topics of Love, Sex, and Immortality.
First, and I'm sure no one at the time was thinking about it, but holofoil covers do not scan well.
The words gave me an Anne Rice-ish sort of vibe, and that's unsurprising, given the era. I think that was around when I was still reading Ms. Rice. But what it does that Rice's works rarely give is to take on the voice of the female vampire. We're all aghast at the moral conundrums that Lestat throws at us, giving us his immortal and transcendent nature as excuse for his sometimes macabre tastes. In the character of Jezebelle, we get a similar articulation, the vampire who views life, and love, as game and nothing more. She satisfies her hungers and moves on, leaving a trail of broken souls behind her. Her opposite is Catherine, who craves an eternal mate (I will admit, there's some pretty bad heteronormativizing [which is a word I think I may have just made up] in the comic). There's one line in Catherine's part that I quite like. As I say, the prose is almost hyperbolic, but I think it still works: "Rays of light hypnotically dance from one strand of her spiraling hair to another, watching themselves in his polished pupils." The image reminds me of Marc-Antoine Mathieu's 3 secondes. There's a connection between graphic literature that I'll bet no one has EVER made!
The third vampire shuns the company of others. We see her in a miniskirt on a WWI battlefield, standing topless in the shadows of a street lamp, and sitting hunched over, nude but for a cloak around her shoulders. But her prose is an evisceration of man, specifically man, and his propensity for war. It's these portraits, mostly nude, that I find most interesting, in that it demonstrates an interesting iconography at work. As I mentioned, the portraits are simple. I could almost see them being adaptations of photographs, but with all but the most necessary detail missing. And a few vampire-y touches added!
So is it a strangely Feminist take on the very male world of Rice's "Vampire Chronicles?" That's kind of how it seems to me.
Also of interest is that writer/artist Mark Paniccia shares a name with an editor at Marvel Comics. I'm trying to get in touch to see if it's some of his very early comics work.
A nice surprise, today, I must admit.
More to come...
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