Penciller: Ryan Benjamin
Inker: Saleem Crawford
First published: 2009
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: Jonathan Romero, aka "Dead Romeo," was the lead singer of the '80s rock band "The Dead Romeos." But that was before a mysterious set of circumstances turned him into a vampire and sent him straight to Hell.
Now he's back on Earth and he has a difficult choice to make: Kill his true love and earn his permanent release from eternal damnation - or protect her and burn for eternity. Either way, someone is going to die! Its vampires, romance, rock and dismemberment like you've never seen before!
The review: Dead Romeo was an odd one, A DC comic release the artwork was passable comic stuff and the idea of Death (a sucker for stories) telling the story of Romeo’s return to Earth with a cadre of vampires, who get to stay out of the fires of Hell if they kill a woman called Whisper was original enough. Why kill whisper? Who knows.
The vampire in charge is a psycho named Dwight Phry – I couldn’t really work out if that was wonderfully referential or just a little too far – and he has a succubus as a familiar, who can make men see what she wants. That was interesting but I think it was hereon in that things went wrong for me. All in all there was a cadre of 6 vampires and a succubus (a seventh vampire was killed by Dwight at the head of the graphic) all up against Whisper and Romeo… it all seemed a little too much.
Why Hell needed so many to kill one girl (bear in mind Romeo is meant to be on the hit squad and if it wasn’t for him she would have died at the first encounter) was one question? But comic wise there seemed too many, they really could have just done it with Dwight, and Yoko the familiar up against Whisper and Romeo. The numbers made the story seem crowded and the evil characters devolved into ciphers.
Other than the returning from Hell bit, the lore was fairly standard… sunlight kills, decapitation kills if the head can’t reattach quickly and silver burns. The trope saw the repentant vampire against the unrepentant – the fact that he had done plenty of evil as Hell’s agent is always kept in mind but never played as heavily as it might be.
All in all it was okay but I wasn’t especially moved. 5 out of 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment