Anite Blake: Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures #1 (of 12)

Released: October 18, 2006

Publishers: Marvel & Dabel Brothers

Story: Laurell K. Hamilton

Adaptation: Stacie Ritchie

Art: Brett Boothe

Cover: Brett Boothe

 

This is really a review of the first two issues since we had to go on hiatus for a couple weeks and missed the first release, or re-release actually. The story goes that Dabel Brothers Productions had gotten the rights to make a comic series out of Laurell K. Hamilton’s first Anita Blake novel, made and released the first issue then ran out of money and shut it all down. Then they sold the rights to publish to Marvel so now Dabel Brothers is producing the work in studio and Marvel is simply printing it all out, hence the re-release of the first issue under a Marvel banner.

 

Quite frankly, the comic is as good as I could have hoped for. Hamilton’s novels are loosely similar to my favorite ‘vampire/werewolf world’, White Wolf’s ‘World of Darkness’. I’ve wanted to see a White Wolf comic of this caliber, but will easily settle for this series, especially since White Wolf’s attempts at comic books were not very good at capturing what made their product unique. The Dabel Brothers obviously are, and Boothe’s consistently beautiful artwork doesn’t hurt either.

 

Boothe’s work has a certain style that lends itself to romanticized, gorgeous vampires, but it’s yet to be seen if he can draw a true mix of character types. He certainly proves his action and monster credentials in issue two where Anita fights a Were-Rat, but all the characters are either pretty or grotesque with very little in-between. For the tone of this series, that shouldn’t be a problem, but anything grittier might make his flaws more apparent. He too often chooses profile shots or directly head-on perspectives (or sometimes both in the same panel) that speak of a more amateurish artist, which is odd because he shows he obviously CAN draw more dynamic panels (like during the graveyard scene in the first issue which is easily his best two pages). That said, he’s very detailed and other than a small bad habit of making all facial expressions have upward looking eyes, he’s well picked for this series.

 

The story itself is well-developed and strikes a good balance between showing the depth the novel creates and keeping the plot moving so we don’t get bogged down in exposition-ary [Editor’s Note: pun off of expeditionary] tangents that are world building but also slightly distracting.

 

Anita Blake is an Animator, someone able to raise the dead into zombies and confer with ghosts. This line of work has given her a large sum of knowledge on all things monster/occult/supernatural so that she is a Police consultant for crimes involving those things. The story opens with newly made vampire offering (slightly demanding) to hire her. She turns them down and the following plot is centered on a big scheme to get her to do what the vampires want anyway. The pacing is fairly good, with decent cliffhangers put into both issues. Along the way we meet a cast of vampires and humans who all seem to have history with Anita in one form or another.

 

As far as Anita goes, she is something more than human, either through her own magic or something else more akin to Blade we don’t know yet. What we do get is a nice strong female lead and an assorted cast of vampires that are diverse enough to be believable, if not a little stereotypical in their portrayals. But hey, that’s half Boothe’s fault since most men all look the same when they have long hair, and partly because we’re only two issues in.

I’m really enjoying the diversity of book’s Marvel’s putting out now. If they’re going to try and monopolize the market, at least they’re actually attempting to fill the hole made by the disappearing publishers.

 

Rating - 8