Even as a teenager, and though I wouldn't have phrased it as such at the time, I was interested in the subject/position of women as both spectators of and characters in the vampire genre. In the early '90s, I was into the Anne Rice book
Interview with the Vampire and Poppy Z. Brite novels (
Lost Souls,
Wormwood).
The way these fairly sexually explicit and gory texts handled potentially misogynistic elements was to basically excise sexualized adult women from the equation: both creators' main characters are in gay relationships. In other words, my 14-year-old self was thrilling to the U. S. literary horror genre equivalent of
yaoi.[1]
In the mid-to-late'90s, however, the television program
Buffy the Vampire Slayer caused a seismic shift. One of the many legacies of that show, besides the advent of a literally and figuratively strong female main character, was to massively reconfigure the vampire genre for teenage girls (The
Twilight series benefited from that).[2]
Tonally, from my standpoint, the mainstream comic-book adaptation of Laurell K. Hamilton's 1993 novel
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures (split into two graphic-novel volumes), which is about a lady zombie-maker-cum-vampire hunter, uneasily tries to straddle the two modes, and ultimately fails to do so.
I think this is why
ABVHGP, the second stop in my quest to find a vampire comic that I like, left me cold, although it has everything going for it. Solidly executed and commercially successful,[3] it's accessible for comics readers and noncomics readers, those who have read the novels and those who haven't.
Although there's a lot of exposition (the U. S. has granted vampires and lycanthropes citizenship; Anita works for a St. Louis agency that reanimates the dead by day and helps out the police by busting/killing supernatural beings who have broken the law by night), it's fairly easy to twig, for which adaptors Stacie Ritchie and Jess Ruffner-Booth must be given credit.
The only thing that wasn't exactly clear to me was
why someone would want to bring an individual back from the dead as a zombie: the two examples in the book — one, to shed some very limited light on foul play related to the individual's death, and two, a father bringing his dead daughter back in an effort to force her to forgive him for molesting her — makes the whole enterprise sound both so ethically suspect and generally ineffectual that it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Artists Brett Booth and Ron Lim are more than competent. Their clear layouts aid in the storytelling; you know where everyone is and what's going on during the action sequences; although the characters spend a lot of time in conversation, it doesn't come across as talking heads; they can draw attractive male and female characters; and the grue is adequate.
(I only have a couple of nitpicks; how many or what kinds of scars the characters have is a pretty important plot point, but when the artists aren't careful, visually, the scars can come across as dry skin, or perhaps like the character is crumbling. Also, characters spend so much time with
their chins down so that they can glare/smolder up through their artfully arranged bangs that I wanted to give them all neck braces.) Although suffering from a slight lack of texture, the colorwork by Imaginary Friends Studio (with Matt Moylan) and June Chung is fairly well done.
I haven't read the original book, so I'm not sure how much or how little they cleaned up the proceedings for the graphic novel,[4] but I think my discontent lies not only in the cognitive disconnect of the PG-13-ification of this type of material (Anita takes showers in which her hair shields the naughty bits just so, males strip down to their … pants, there are
grawlix (punctuation marks in lieu of certain expletives), etc.), but in Anita herself.
Though she's capable, loyal, action-oriented, can dish out the hardboiled narration and fire off the occasional quip, she's all over the place (she does so many different things it's hard to keep up with her reasoning for doing them in the order she does) and is simply not that original or remarkable of a character. Her lone little quirk —
she likes penguins — might as well be a point requirement on a role-playing-game character sheet. It's possible that, with the heavy-lifting of world-building out of the way, there's more internal character development and an adjustment in tone in the new comics series based on the second book,
The Laughing Corpse: there's just nothing compelling me to read it.
Notes:
[1] Brite lost me first, and Rice soon after, when I got tired of the women in their books dying horribly after birthing monsters.
[2] What's interesting to me about
Twilight is that, when I was growing up, I was reading "up" — that is, material intended for an older audience. In terms of genre best-sellers these days like the Harry Potter books, readers tend to be reading "down" — that is, material for readers younger than them. What this says about reading and publishing, I don't know.
[3] According to
ICv2, "Marvel's
Anita Blake - Vampire Hunter, by Laurell K. Hamilton, was the top graphic novel in comic stores in July [2007], with around 8,500 copies sold. The second volume of 52 was #2 at around 8,000 copies." Volume one was in the #1 Diamond Graphic Novel slot that month.
http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/11132.html[4] Though a friend of mine said she stopped reading the series when it became, to paraphrase, a "big orgy" much further down the line.
Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter©2007, 2008 Laurell K. Hamilton
Image credits:
Panels from Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Guilty Pleasures ©2007, 2008 Marvel Comics. Click image for full-sized view.
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
