Bullets and fangs and melodrama – oh, my! “V-Wars: God of Death” is a dark and brutal standalone story revisiting the vampiric world made popular in Jonathan Maberry’s series of books and comics. If this is your first experience with the series, there’s a lot here for fans of modern, ultraviolent vampire cinema, like Blade or Underworld. But there are also contextual rewards for longtime fans in this giant-sized issue.
Written by Jonathan MaberryCover by Ryan Brown
Illustrated by Alex Milne
Colored by Brittany Peer
Lettered by Christa MiesnerMichael Fayne was patient zero of the plague that exploded into the Vampire Wars. A cult of militant vampires wants to resurrect him. Luther Swann leads a strike team to prevent the rise of a vampire god. New York Times bestseller Jonathan Maberry returns with an all-new V-Wars tale.
“V-Wars” returns from the dead after its comic’s four-ish years hiatus with this ‘God of Death’ one-shot. Coincidentally, it’s just in time for the franchise’s Netflix series premiere later this year, starring two of the same main characters. The strange thing about it is that it seems like the events of the comic take place seven years after those of the not-yet-released TV series, and spoilers abound within.
This “V-Wars: God of Death” one-shot drops us in a year after the end of the “V-Wars,” when humans and vampires have a shaky, tenuous peace treaty in place. But parties on both sides are working to disrupt that peace for their own reasons. One of those parties is a small group of vampire terrorists. In this world, many vampires are peaceful people going about their daily lives without doing harm to non-vampires. But because of the actions of a small, violent group of vampires, many humans want to kill every single vampire on sight. It’s an imperfect (and fairly obvious) allegory for Muslims and xenophobia but, hey, its heart is in the right place.
Overall, “V-Wars: God of Death” tells an interesting story but can suffer from a feeling of being rushed and trying to cram too much story into too small a space. Proofreading or copyediting misses can take grammatically inclined readers out of the moment and, while simplified backgrounds can be a good and important tool for overworked illustrators on a deadline, some pages are almost entirely panels with simplified backgrounds, while others have meticulously designed backgrounds. It can make for a reading experience that feels a little unbalanced, but overall, not a deal-breaker.
The “too much story in too small a space” issue is also understandable, when you think about it. Readers new to the world have to know the details of the “V-Wars” for the events of the comic to have gravity. They also have to introduce Luther Swann, Michael Fayne, and their supporters, both for the comic to succeed and for readers to be properly introduced to the Netflix series’ main characters. Plus, there’s the whole “resurrecting the dead vampire god” plot the creators have to build the story around. And honestly, it feels less like a one-shot and more like an “issue #1,” launching the next arc of the “V-Wars” stories. While it tells a complete story, it most definitely ends things in a way that leaves room for more, should people demand it.
Maybe the issue is less about Jonathan Maberry fitting in all the story he wants to tell and more about illustrator, Alex Milne, finding room for it all. For the pages and panels with full detail, Milne fills them. In fact, he fills them with so much to look at, it feels like you need a larger comic, like the page simply can’t contain all the action and detail within. You almost wish each panel were a little larger, had a little more room to breathe.
Unfortunately, neither Maberry nor Milne finds time to make the characters likable or three-dimensional. You get a sense of some history between Swann and Fayne, the ex-friends at the center of the story and the Netflix series, but the more human, character-defining moments are sacrificed for plot development, backstory, and action sequences. Maybe the comic relies on the TV show for that, or maybe the issue was full enough as it is, but it feels like a shame we don’t get more about these characters to feel fully invested in at least one of them.
Continued belowMilne’s style tends toward the photorealistic, which makes sense for a gritty vampire book. You can definitely see some manga influence in the character designs, especially in close-ups. It lends a style that leans just slightly cartoonish, though Milne grounds the overall tone in the realm of the serious with plenty of violence and buckets of blood. So much blood, in fact, that it literally drips down the entire page at one point, acting as a partition between the events in the terrorist vampires’ story and the people who oppose them. It’s one hell of a way to build tension leading up to the comic’s final moments.
Between the shading from the line art and Brittany Peer’s dark and moody color palette, “V-Wars” fits right in with the late ‘90s, early aughts vampire action movie aesthetic. For Peer, though, it feels like new ground, since so much of her work has been with warm palettes or the pink-and-blue aesthetic becoming increasingly popular in modern comics. It’s a pleasant surprise seeing her create something so tonally different from her past work. Something eerie, that plays up bloody, visceral reds and the Tesla-inspired glow of machinery. It goes far to sell the cold, violent world the events take place in.
While Christa Miesner’s lettering is light on flourishes and sound effects, her main feat in “V-Wars: God of Death” is fitting a vast amount of dialogue into pages already heavy with art and leading the eye with the balloons. Her color choice for the technological TV narration bubbles matches the aforementioned eerie glow in so many of the comic’s panels, which helps adhere to an overall style for the comic. While the lettering doesn’t command attention (and one could argue that it shouldn’t), it does well to tell the story without getting in the way of the art and taking the reader out of the moment, even in dialogue-heavy scenes.
Overall, the “V-Wars: God of Death” one-shot is pretty well done for a post-goth, hyperviolent, vampire-centric action comic. If that’s the sub-genre you’re looking for, or if you’re a fan of the series already, this comic will be right up your proverbial alley. If you don’t fit into either of those categories, you may want to wait to grab this one until you know if you like the V-Wars Netflix series.
Final Verdict: 6.5 – A vampire franchise revived just in time for a Netflix series premiere featuring the same characters may feel like a cramped companion piece, but it still has fangs.
