Saturday, February 23, 2013

Vampire Tales volume 2 – review

Author: Various

Artist: Various

First Published: 2010 (this format)

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: It’s 1974, and vampires have never been more frightening!

Morbius, the Living Vampire, can’t catch a break as he battles a demon cult and the bizzare Death-Flame for the life of Amanda saint! Plus: Witness Morbius’ origin like never before! Also featuring Lilith, the daughter of Dracula! Kraska! Count Varma! Count Barsac and the Nazis! And more vampires than you can shake a wooden stake at!

The review: How many exclamation marks can one small blurb use? This is the second volume of Vampire Tales – we looked at the first volume here - and covers issues 4 -7. The blurb does reveal much of what is in store for a reader, plenty of Morbius, including his origins and, as well as Lilith the Daughter of Dracula we get a short piece about the biblical Lilith . Satana seemed to have been phased out in this issues as a character.

Morbius is on fine, depressed form, describing a feed thusly: “The Gothic romance novels lie. Roman Polanski’s vampire movie myths are just that. There is nothing erotic or romantic about the vampiric act. It is sheer brutal desperation.”

For the most part the standalone stories are excellent, great stories with the fantastic 70s black and white art that I mentioned in my review of volume 1. One story, Bats, stood out therefore as it was the only one that lost its own internal logic and made the reader surface from the story and wonder what the Hell the author was thinking. One poor short story in a whole volume, however, is an impressive quality mark. Like volume 1 this deserves 8 out of 10.

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