Vampirella Halloween Special 2006 #1

Written by Phil Hester

Art by Stephen Segovia

Cover by Amanda Conner

 

What would Halloween be without vampires? And what would vampires be without Vampirella? (Don’t answer either of those; they’re rhetorical questions. I don’t really know what Halloween would be without vampires, or vampires would be without Vampi, nor do I really see how that matters anyway).

 

To make sure readers get their annual, seasonal dose of both, Harris Comics has released a nice, accessible, reader-friendly little horror story featuring the most scantily clad, pointy-toothed horror heroine of them all.

 

We open in Las Vegas, while overhearing snippets of conversation that seems to be coming from inside a prison of some sort, where the speakers are all stuck together for a very long time. The main narrator tells the story of how he ended up here, while we watch Vampi strut down the strip in a red trench coat with a slit all the way up her thigh (Man, whatever she wears ends up looking revealing—even an ankle-length overcoat).

 

Our narrator is a tattoo artist, one who considers himself something of a Michelangelo among tattoo artists. One night, a drop dead gorgeous woman with eyes that could command men to do whatever she wanted (that would be Vampi) enters his shop, and presents him with a blank canvas that he could turn into his cistine chapel—her own naked body.

 

He gets to work on her back, but, well, things go a little funny, and a brutal murder in his past is revealed, as he ends up suffering the fate of a past victim in life, and then again in death. Over and over and over again.

 

The story, by Phil Hester, is a nicely crafted little horror story with a twist at the end, the sort you might see on an episode of the Twilight Zone, if they ever had hardly-dressed vampire wome, recreational body suspension, buckets of blood and demons on the show. Inserted into the story is Vampi’s origin (well, one of her origins), which sort of distracts from the effectiveness of the story around it, but it’s such a brief sequence that it’s a little easier to forgive.

 

The art, by Stephen Segovia, isn’t terribly inspired (to hear the narrator’s overheated description of his intentions for his tattoo, I was more than disappointed at what Segovia draws), but he draws sexy women well, and does a deft job of showing us as much of Vampi’s body as possible without crossing the line into mature reader’s territory.

 

The gag cover, by Amanda Conner, features Vampi winking and holding two strategically placed jack o’ lanterns, making for one of the more modest Vampirella covers in memory.

 Rating - 5