Review by Ian Keogh
Five years have passed since the events of Blood and Magic, in which the apocalypse was predicted. Apparently it’s now imminent, but Antoine Wolfe has spent most of those five years in prison, leaving Anita Christ to reach eighteen in the company of Freddy Chtonic and Scottish vampire Isobel. They’re a bizarrely disfunctional family.
After an opening chapter setting the scene, Aleš Kot jumps back to the end of the previous volume to fill in new readers with one hell of a lot of explanation as to what’s happened since. It’s effective in answering some mysteries left dangling last time, such as that of Wolfe’s brother, but extended to such a length they transmit as the Cliff’s Notes version of a story arc planned without ever seeing print.
New artist Ricardo López-Ortiz is one hell of a talent. The apparent sketchiness belies a very effective definition of the cast. His people are stylised to look ordinary, even ugly. It’s an ugly world on show, so why would the people be any different? When the really gruesome stuff arrives, that’s also startling. He supplies squishy, morphing monsters under the control of an emaciated sexual threat. It’s all far more disturbing than would have been the case under previous artist Matt Taylor.
The series title has a double meaning, so Wolfe was the focus last time, but spends most of this volume under restricted circumstances. It’s a waste as Kot had previously defined him well as the only member of the cast to have any great depth, and no-one else steps up to replace his appeal.
Kot’s writing isn’t straightforward. Readers have to interpret revelations and place them in some kind of chronology to construct the motivations for what’s happening. Even doing that though, there are shortcomings, inexplicable absences and not much of a plot. Kot can be a smug writer, and toward the end it’s plain insulting when a convenience is explained away by breaking the fourth wall to note anything can happen in comics. Given what the threat becomes, this is not the apocalypse suggested in the previous volume, and the rushed ending indicates a series prematurely cancelled. If Kot really hadn’t been building toward anything better, that’s a blessing in disguise.
