Creative Staff:
Story: Nancy A. Collins
Art: Francesco Manna
What They Say:
Welcome to Altered States… Dynamite Entertainment’s parallel reality in the vein of DC’s Elseworlds and Marvel’s What If! Ella Normandy is one of three space explorers sent on an expedition to Venus-But on the way to their destination, the interplanetary ship is sucked into a mysterious space-time portal and ends up crash-landing on the alien planet Drakulon, where the rivers run with blood. There she climbs from the wreckage to find herself the only human on a planet filled with vampires-and no way to get back home!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Altered States concept is one that I can wholly get behind as reimagining characters in new ways can often unleash potential in their mainline incarnation. With Vampirella, I’ll admit this is a bit less so simply because we’ve had so many Vampirella stories as of late across different concepts, such as the recent Feary Tales, that it just becomes another piece. But with the ability to do one main story here for a whole one shot without getting dragged into short stories, there’s some real potential for fun here. It also doesn’t hurt that the main series writer, Nancy A. Collins, steps in to write this while getting some solid artwork from Francesco Manna.
With this incarnation, we’re thrown to the year 2069 where Ella is the youngest member of a four person crew that’s on board the Arthur Clark ship that’s making its way to Venus over the course of six months. Things don’t get a chance to get explored on board much as the situation turns dangerous quickly with the sudden arrival of some alien technology near them, which essentially sucks them in and throws them across the galaxy, where the ship – not meant for planetary landings – ends up crashing down on an alien world that we know as Drakulon. There’s a quick whittling down of characters, with two dying in the crash and it doesn’t take long for the third member to get offed as well, and Ella finds herself the sole survivor on an alien world. One that has some humanoid beings on it with technology that lets her talk with them, but also some creepy primal beastie humanoid creatures that ravage the lands around the main city where the people reside.
There’s a very fast pace to this overall, making me wish it was twice as long so it could breathe, but we get the fun of Ella discovering the city and its people with their quirks while also learning about their ancient selves that created the space transporter technology before everything fell apart ages ago. There’s a smoothness to the simple character material we get from those that Ella befriends, saving them from the beasts, but there’s also the old school surreal scares that comes for her in realizing just how different they are. Which, in turn, reveals how different she is and the way her body reacts to this world. There’s some simple character reversal things going on here and while it is predictable in some ways, it’s also fun seeing Ella reacting to it while also forging her own path and looking to do right by herself. It’s one of those shortened reimaginings overall, but I’ll admit a certain curiosity in wanting to see more of this reverse style world.
In Summary:
Vampirella as a character is pretty open to interpretation, which we’ve seen a lot of in the past year outside of her main series, and this is another brick in the wall of it. While it is interesting and I had fun with it, I have to admit that I wish they had taken some grander chances with it and really presented her in a striking new way, particularly after five issues of reimaginings in the Feary Tales series. This is a more traditional altered kind of tale overall, nicely done and well presented, but I would have liked to have seen a more wholesale rejection of the familiar and really gone off in some much stranger and intriguing direction.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: March 4th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
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