Requiem: Vampire Knight Volume Two

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Requiem: Vampire Knight Volume Two (Heavy Metal, 2010)



Heavy Metal has released the second in their series of dirt-cheap, frill-free collections of Requiem: Vampire Knight for the American market. This completely insane series, created by Pat Mills and Oliver Ledroit for a French publisher, Nickel, is one of the most gleefully demented and brain-bludgeoningly bizarre series I've ever read, completely entertaining from start to finish, and very poorly served by the slapdash way that Heavy Metal has chosen to package it.

Requiem is the story of Heinrich and Rebecca, lovers who betrayed each other in World War Two and have met again in Hell for a second chance. Unfortunately, he's now a vampire and she's now a ghoul and Hell is a planet where time runs backwards and pirate queens in flying ships wage war on cybernetic werewolves and soldiers in Dracula's army carry weapons that fire bolts and go "TEPESS!" when they're used. About every fifth page, a new plate gets spun and somehow Mills makes this colossal, unwieldy and thunderously odd series work. The whole story is a great exercise in making readers say "You have got to be kidding" aloud as often as possible.

Requiem is published in France as an annual 48-page story, with nine of the planned dozen issues out so far. Heavy Metal has collected the first six in two volumes, the second of which came out earlier this year. These books were designed to get the job done as cheaply as possible. There are no wasted pages among the 144 between the covers; copyright information is on the inside front and everything else is comic. You're telling me they couldn't afford a single extra signature? Anything to space this out, give some creator credits, background information, even just basic front- and endpapers? It's not like anybody's ever going to mistake Requiem for high art, but that doesn't mean that Heavy Metal needs to release it in a package so amateurish and sloppy. Recommended for older readers despite itself, basically.

Requiem - Vampire Knight: Resurrection

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Requiem - Vampire Knight: Resurrection (Heavy Metal, 2009).



I spent years raising an eyebrow about this title, and boy, was I ever wrong. Requiem: Vampire Knight is a series of annual 48-page stories that Pat Mills scripts for a French publisher. Eight episodes, of a projected twelve, have been published. It's fully painted by Oliver Ledroit, and, translated into English, it appears annually in the pages of Heavy Metal, which I'd like to not set off alarm bells, but the magazine's presented far more terrible comics than good ones over the years. Plus, y'understand, I kinda got bored of vampires a really long time ago.

Still, the Guv'nor has written enough great comics to pique my curiosity when I saw a collected edition of this in Diamond's catalog a few months back, so I figured it was worth a try, and I'm very glad I did. Apparently, Mills began putting Requiem together during a frustrating period away from 2000 AD, where he and then-editor Andy Diggle locked horns over multiple issues, and the break clearly did everybody a world of good, because this is a terrific comic.

It starts in World War Two, where, in short order, a Nazi soldier named Heinrich learns that his girlfriend Rebecca is Jewish and then he gets shot dead with a bullet to the face. He wakes up on the planet Resurrection, where time flows backwards and morality is completely inverted. Here, evil gits like him have become vampires and are charged with acting as a police force of sorts, with an endless supply of willing victims, but constant intrusions into their order by new arrivals from throughout Earth's history and future. It's a world where archaeologists are charged with burying the past, and where the rulers of each social caste are, since time moves in reverse here, insane, hyperintelligent babies.

This book is absolutely bugnuts, and I mean that in the best possible way. About every eight pages, Mills ratchets up the stakes by adding crazy new concepts and characters, and giving the planet a wider, weirder scope than readers will be expecting going in. It probably wouldn't surprise anybody with a background in this kind of fiction to learn that Rebecca has reincarnated on Resurrection as well, and that the former lovers are now in opposition, but the nature of the Rebecca's new status as a ghoul is pretty stunning, particularly after we've met a trio of ghouls who steer flying pirate ships in air raids over major cities. The politics and infighting among the higher echelons of the vampires is truly fascinating stuff, and then we meet the giant, cybernetic werewolves...

The series has a pretty casual approach to violence and nudity which won't be to all readers' taste and marks this as a book for over-18s. That said, I'm very glad to finally have the chance to read Requiem, which certainly ranks among my favorite series by Mills. This English-language edition, published in the US by Heavy Metal, reprints the first three 48-page episodes in a 144-page book. Sadly, there are no additional features or background material presented; the annotations and supplementary information that Mills has provided for Rebellion and Titan are sorely missed here.

Sad to say, there seems to be a little publication confusion; it appears that Panini will also be releasing volumes this year, but each of these will only have two episodes per book, at 112 pages. I'd like to get that cleared up before folk start spending money on the wrong series. At any rate, this is highly recommended for older audiences, especially the ones like me who were a little skeptical!

Rogue Trooper and Sha

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Rogue Trooper: Realpolitik (Rebellion, 2007) and Sha (Heavy Metal, 2008).



Rogue Trooper is a perennial 2000 AD franchise featuring a blue-skinned clone soldier, gone AWOL to track down a traitor and wandering a chemically-wasted future landscape. The character was dusted off for a new series of adventures by Gordon Rennie to tie in to Rebellion's spiffy video game in 2005. Rennie wrote most of the episodes in this book, with a final three-parter tackled by Ian Edginton and Steve Pugh. Overall, they are not bad, and the structured, overarching plot is more engaging than the patchy, episodic nature of the character's 1980s series. There are a couple of stumbles, mainly built around a ponderous "they were soldiers and they died heroes and war is hard" two-parter that reads like Garth Ennis-lite, but there are some great new characters devised for the run, and some great black and white artwork from contributors like PJ Holden and Dylan Teague. Recommended.



I've always been curious about the comics that Pat Mills writes for European publishers. If I understand correctly, many of these appear as annual 48-page serialized editions in France, and are later translated back to English to run in the pages of Heavy Metal.

Sha orginally appeared in France as three books from 1997-99 and tells the story of a police officer in the ugly, dystopian future city of New Eden trying to solve the horrific murders of some corporate overlords. These "men" are actually demonically possessed avatars of constantly-reincarnating beings who, centuries before, had put a witch to the stake, and she called upon a spirit of vengeance called Sha to avenge her death...

I don't want to call it Mills by the numbers, but this certainly follows familiar patterns from Mills' other work in the 1990s. Especially in the first storyline, the way the villains emphasize their fetish for technology and firepower only to be thwarted with minimal effort by Sha's use of bizarre magic is very reminiscent of his early '90s series Finn. The crusading, repugnant Christians remind me of Torquemada and his crew from Nemesis the Warlock, as does the use of constantly-reincarnated lives. And there is much, much more one could see.

It's certainly not bad, and Oliver Ledroit's glorious depiction of such a horrible future will keep any reader's attention. Yet there's much here which, to my overcooked, over-analytical eye, looks a lot like work I've read before and follows a very similar template, with little variety in emphasis or tone. Recommended for Mills devotees.

(Originally posted September 24, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)