Vampirella, Crimson Chronicles 2

Vampirella, Crimson Chronicles #11-18

by Archie Goodwin, Jose Gonzales

This book collects Vampirella stories from issues #11-18 of the original Vampirella magazine. The stories are in black and white.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Archie Goodwin was an American comic book writer, editor, and artist. He worked on a number of comic strips in addition to comic books, and is best known for his Warren and Marvel Comics work. For Warren he was chief writer and editor of landmark horror anthology titles Creepy and Eerie, and for Marvel he set up the creator-owned Epic Comics as well as adapting Star Wars into both comics and newspaper strips. He is regularly cited as the "best-loved comic book editor, ever."

Reviews

[Jack Haringa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second volume of Harris' collection of classic Vampirella stories from the Warren magazines features the start of the amazing and iconic art of Jose Gonzales for the character. While the first couple issues collected are drawn by Tom Sutton, an entirely competent artist, Gonzales' work entirely overshadows Sutton's and that of the artists who drew the majority of the interstitial pieces. Archie Goodwin's stories are ludicrous but entertaining, with overwrought dialogue that would have made E.C. writers proud. I had forgotten the strong links between the stories--the thread of the Crimson Chronicles, the battles against servants of Chaos, the distrust Conrad Van Helsing has for Vampirella--that give an impression of greater scale. Particularly fun is the unique take on the origin of Dracula and all vampires on Earth.

The only major flaw in the collection, once one accepts the B-movie melodrama and conceits, is the copy editing. Whether the fault is with the letterer or the editor is irrelevant; the fact is the text is littered with punctuation mistakes, dropped words, and other distracting errors that someone should have caught. I'm sure these problems are from the original Warren publications, and I can't fault Harris for collecting the stories in their original form, but the editing at Warren was remarkably slipshod. I suppose they figured people were there for the art, and in most cases they'd be right.