I only had one book on my pull list this week and it was Vampirella: Trial Of the Soul written by Bill Willingham with Giuseppe Cafaro providing the art, and Andrew Dalhouse and Carlos Mangual on colors and letters respectively. I’ve been looking forward to this one-shot. I thought it sounded interesting and looked great, both of which proved to be true.
I’ve enjoyed a lot of the work Willingham has done for Dynamite over the years so I figured this would be a good bet. A word of caution however – this isn’t really your typical one-and-done story you may expect from a one-shot. This feels more like a teaser for more to come. The book mainly serves to introduce a new foe for Vampirella named Prester John. He’s working for a mysterious group who wants him to uncover whether or not Vampirella has a soul. He is unable to make a determination and is ordered to kill Vampirella, however he ends up being somewhat conflicted about this. He seems like he will be a sort of “frenemy” – not entirely good or bad. I think he is an interesting character to add to the Vampirella cannon so I hope we’ll see him again. We don’t learn much about his backstory so there’s plenty more to explore there.
I wasn’t familiar with the work of Giuseppe Cafaro before, but I really liked what he did with the art in this book. The art was consistently good throughout and he draws Vampirella beautifully. I hope we get to see him work on the character more in the future.
Overall, I highly recommend this issue. If you’re a Vampirella fan, definitely pick it up. It’s a fun read and hopefully there will be some sort of follow up in the near future.
Heard about this the other day. Sounds intriguing.
That one was great. The intro, oh joy. I could see the steam coming out of Vampis ears š If the end hadn’t been a bit lukewarm, this one-shot (why, oh why, isn’t THIS a series? Instead of the drag-on confusion fest of the regular one) would have been epic. 4.5/5 eyeteeth.