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Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures #1 and #2
Book Released: 22 Nov 2006 (2nd printing)
Posted 28 Nov 2006
Writer: Laurell K. Hamilton/Stacie M. Ritchie
Artist: Brett Booth
Letters: Bill Tortolini
Colors: Arif Priyanto
Publisher: Dabel Brothers Productions/Marvel
3.90 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by J. W. DeBolt Jr.
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“Willie McCoy had been a jerk before he died. His being dead didn’t change that.”
Ya gotta love the first line of the book as it draws you into a society where vampirism is legal and monsters and magic exist side-by-side with your average people and your above-average — like Anita Blake, animator of the dead and part-time vampire hunter.
The Anita Blake comic is written well enough that you don’t have to be familiar with the characters or have read the books to read the comic.
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The first Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel is being translated into the comicbook format by the Dabel Brothers, or DBPro, who are also currently producing Orson Scott Card’s Red Prophet and Raymond Feist’s Magician’s Apprentice. Hamilton is probably the premiere writer in the field of erotic horror mystery stories.
Here, Willie McCoy, a small time hood who has recently been turned into a vampire comes to Anita to try to hire her to find out who’s decapitating a certain group of vampires. Not liking vampires, and having the scars to back up her dislike, Anita declines. However, the hood’s master does not take “no” for an answer. When Anita begrudgingly joins her friend for a bachelorette party, they go to a vampire strip club, and then things begin to get strange and dangerous for Anita.
The narration and dialog seem to be taken directly from the novel, as they should be.
The pacing runs along well, and about the same speed as the novel, but, of course, without as much detail. It flows well for the comicbook format. Although the first half of the first issue is dialogue and narration, it helps build up the tension needed — such as hinting at the bad blood between Anita and vampires and showing she can be resistant but is not invulnerable to vampires’ hypnotic powers — to make the stage scene in the strip club more dramatic.
The events are so far exact recreations of those in the novel. The first issue comprises roughly chapters one through four and the second, five through ten. So if they continue to match this pace, then the series should end with issue number nine or ten, as there are 47 chapters in the book.
The main reason the comicbook is so faithful to the original is the Laurell K. Hamilton insisted on maintaining creative control — a habit Orson Scott Card usually takes as well, but on Red Prophet there seems to be a panel of expert fans who are helping out that title’s creators (I could be wrong there, but they are listed in the credits).
The Anita Blake comic is written well enough that you don’t have to be familiar with the characters or have read the books to read the comic. This should bring a new breed of comic fans over to the novels and perhaps we can see Meredith Gentry (A Kiss of Shadows) in a comicbook format too some day. Also, Hamilton fans may be introduced to the comicbook universe.
DBPRo is now partnering with Marvel. Perhaps the transition or immediately preceding circumstances accounts for the long pause between issues of titles and the delay in the debut of Anita Blake. The partnership should help improve distribution and visibility for the Dabel Brothers, who assure us that the creators in their line will continue to have autonomy. The first printing of the first and second issues sold out, so I predict, safely, that this title will do well.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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