Author: Eliot Rahal
Artist: Dike Ruan
First Published: 2021 (TPB)
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: The year is 3333. Earth is in a state of recovery. Vampires are real, and though far less populous, they thrive alongside humans in the Japanese-engineered mega-city known as Asylum. People have come to understand that some Immortals are good, some are bad, and most navigate the world without incident. There is peace. That is…until now. Someone is brutally murdering vampires. And Detective Harper Halloway has been assigned to the case. To solve it, she’ll have to unearth a much deeper truth: The future of humanity has been edited.
The Review: Originally created by Hiroshi Koizumi, this graphic novel was subtitled as a Ninja Vampire Tale and set over a millennium from now. The setting is the International Republic of Displaced Peoples – or the city of Asylum and starts with the investigation of a murder of a vampire by detectives Harper Halloway and Atticus Black, a human and vampire respectively. In this there are several levels of vampire – there are purebloods, turned (by being bitten but there are also turned through genetic manipulation we later discover) and hybrids (which, as we get an area of the city called Dhampir Island, I assume are offspring but they tend to just be mentioned as weaker than full vampires).
Very early into the book Black captures the serial killer who has been murdering vampires… or so he claims. It becomes clear that there are two vampire killers out there and one is Black himself (and the person he arrested is a patsy). As Harper discovers the truth she is bitten by Black, who suffers a huge amount of damage at the hands of Toyo – the other vampire killer. Black is rebuilt (replacing an arm, half his torso and both legs with cybernetics as, whilst vampires can heal, they cannot regrow limbs) and Harper is framed as an accomplice of the killer. Toyo was a genetically manipulated vampire from a thousand years before and knows the truth: the pureblood vampires are not from our world, rather they came from another dimension in an invasion. They quickly took the world and had survivors build asylum – which was essentially a human farm – and then manipulated media (and history) to make out that they were the liberators of humanity rather than the oppressors. Toyo was one of a group of anti-vampire ninjas created by the yakuza, who had taken the mantle of the resistance after the world Governments capitulated. Unfortunately, he had been buried, sleeping, in the manipulation pod (during what appeared to be the base collapsing, of course he was unaware of the event) and has just woken and continued his mission.
There are, as you can see, some great ideas in this. One brief (a frame long) one was seeing Black before a mirror that only reflects his cybernetic parts. However, the great ideas aren’t developed as much as they could have been and there is so much more that could have been explored. As the book is labelled as the complete series, I suspect they will go unexplored. The book itself, moves from one battle to the next as the ex-partners, along with the ninja from the past, battle each other. The art is solid and consistent, looking good throughout. The location was strange in that, despite some futuristic looking skylines and Black’s cybernetics, it didn’t look too futuristic but that can be said to be down to the oppression the humans are under (without realising). If this disappointed in any way, it was down to the fact that there are characters and concepts that deserve exploration. 6.5 out of 10. Thanks to number 1 son, who got me this for Christmas.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
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