Vampires are everywhere
100 Words Or Less
Dean Marklin finds out his hometown of Dormont, PA, is host to vampires and that he's got a natural ability to hunt these vampires down. Together with his girlfriend, Dee-Dee O'Day, and his boss, "Scuba Dave" Donovan, they rid The Grand movie theater of a vampire nest. Along the way, Dean encounters Jocelyn Elder, a 357-year-old vampire, who turns out to be a friendly foe in his war against the undead.So Then I Said...
This book is sort of a mess. The reader is introduced to Dean and Jocelyn on the first page but they've already met before. In fact, Dean had staked her the night previous. I never like when the reader is just dropped into a story mid-way and this was what it felt like in this issue. Apparently, this comic is based on a short story called Vampire Hunter Dean, which could be where all the past stuff happened. Fine, let's just say I should have read that first. But the flow of the story in this issue is just all over the place. First, the story is in one scene, then it skips to a scene that happens later, and then skips back to after the first scene before continuing with the scene in the future they skipped to before. The writer doesn't do a very good job of letting the reader know the timeline flow so it's easy to keep flipping back and forth throughout the comic, trying to keep up logistically.Unless you've read the original short story, you are not going to know what's happening. Which is a bad thing for a #1 issue. How did Dean find out about the vampires? How did he become a vampire hunter? What happened between Dean and Jocelyn? There's not a lot of explanation of what's currently going on either. What's the beef between the old and new vampires? Why did Dean buy the theatre?
The cover shown in Previews was what attracted me to the title. And I have to say, out of the entire package, the cover still is the only selling point for me. Mark Wheatley did a brilliant canvas painting for the cover. Sadly, the interior art didn't live up to the cover; It felt very amateurish to me.
