I, Vampire – Rise of the Vampires – review

Writers: Joshu Hale Fialkov & Peter Milligan

Artists: Andrea Sorrentino, Admira Wijaya & Daniel Sampere

Release date: 2013 (trade paperback)

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Against an Ancient Evil.

Andrew Bennett, a vampire who has dedicated his existence to eradicating his own kind, is off the board. In his absence, bloodsuckers across the world have gone berserk, attacking anyone and everyone with a pulse, as Cain, the grand sire of all his brethren, enacts his bloody rise in Gotham City.

Fearing that her apocalyptic vision of the future has come to pass, Madame Xanadu mobilizes her Justice League Dark team to retrieve Andrew from the realm of the dead and stop the rise of the vampires. But everything the JL Dark members know about how to slay a vampire is useless, for the world has changed…

detail, with batgirl

The review: It’s a good job there is a contains spoilers at the top of this review as that blurb totally spoils Volume 1 of this series. This is the continuation of “The New 52!” re-boot of I, Vampire and Bennett died at the end of the last volume. However, unbeknown to him, the only vampire with a conscience was a “demon lock” holding Cain (father of all vampires) in his preternatural prison. With him gone Cain has risen.

The JL Dark’s arrival adds fuel to the fire as Cain absorbs their magic. The episode itself features a couple of apocalypse level battles, one featuring the Van Helsings – a secret society of vampire hunters dating back to ancient Egypt – Stoker borrowed the name for his novel. They have amulets that resurrects them after dying – as mummies, it is said, but quickly they are referred to as zombies. It was interesting to read that the Van Helsings aimed to turn their attention to the supers after they had eradicated the vampire threat. The Stormwatch are also involved in this volume.

Less character development than the first volume, this did not suffer for it as the pace was frantic. I was less keen on the art in this volume. Sorrentino’s signature art was fantastic but the style changed when concentrating on the JL Dark, for instance, and I thought it less striking. All that said it built on the base of the first volume and strode purposefully forward. 7.5 out of 10.