It’s traditional for me to start a review of a Vampirella comic with a comment on the cosplay variant cover. I suppose it’s because I’ve always felt that the character of Vampirella was nothing more than an impossible, sleazy, masturbatory male fantasy, with her improbable frame and anti-gravity boobs.

Yet models such as Rachel Hollon, who frequently features in cosplay (barely) as the eponymous space vampire on comic covers, prove that the character may still be obvious material for fantasising (if that’s your thing), but as improbable as she is, she’s not impossible.

Anyway, all this is to distract from the actual content of this review. The first story arc of this relaunched Vampirella series was a baffling, convoluted mess of characters and narrative time jumps. This issue kicks off a new storyline, so is it any easier to follow?

Marginally. Writer Priest has calmed down a bit on the time jumps and reduced the number of cast members we’re following, but with lots of the exposition explaining stuff that happened in the previous issues which I had completely failed to understand, it feels like it’s course correcting far too late.

And it still doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Threads about Dracula taking a new form and being hunted, or Vampirella taking on drug cartels, would be fine in isolation, but there’s still too much going on for anything to properly breathe or be explored.

The art is nice, at least. But the story continues to baffle and fail to justify any of its various threads, while finally revealing at least some of what happened before. Without necessarily continuing anything that was left previously dangling. Utterly bizarre stuff, and really, really bad.

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