Finally, after long months of waiting I got the two Bloodrayne one-shots I was waiting for.
I'll pause while most of you leave.
Ok, here we go. I'm probably grading on a curve, to a certain extent, given that we're talking about comics based on a video game character (say, who remembers the Super Mario Bros. comics?). Let's roll.
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So, the Brimstone Society present Rayne with a mission: Board a German zepplin and terminate a vampire they're transporting to the United States (this is set in 1937). Thus, Rayne boards the flight, and meets a kindly elderly couple and their nephew. So there's some nice character moments, as Rayne spends time with this friendly trio, while trying to conceal that she's a half-vampire, which can be tricky in the daytime. However, the vampire she's here to kill - who also happens to share a father with her - is aware of her presence, and sends one of his soldiers after her. From there, we get plenty of fighting and decapitations as Rayne tries to deal with being ambushed in her suite and destroying her target, while injured and in a zepplin, which had problems with, you know, exploding. That leads to what you might consider an amusing little reveal at the end of the story. At least, I was amused, you might not be.
Steven O'Connell and Jeffrey Stevenson give us a nice story, with some moments that highlight how isolated Rayne feels, what with her father having slaughtered her human family when she was young, all in an attempt to force her to join up with him. You get to see how quickly she takes to this couple that treat her very well, as she's probably lacked for affection for awhile. Still, O'Connell and Stevenson leave plenty of time for Romano Molenaar to draw scenes of great violence, which is of course, a major part of the character. Not that he doesn't do well in the quieter moments, although when drawing someone from a distance, they get a bit lopsided, and he seemed to have some trouble with Rayne's nose, but maybe that's just my opinion.
All in all, bright, vibrant, fun, fast paced, a 4 out of 5.
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I felt that the pacing was off, or that they tried to do too much (or maybe I'm too used to Bendis' pace to handle self-contained one issue stories). It feels like between her original mission, this Tiger Wraith showing up, "DarkRayne", and the return of Emphemera, it seemed like too much was going on. They needed to pick one or two and go with them, like maybe just the serpent and DarkRayne, or Tiger Wraith and Emphemera. Doing too much means very little got accomplished. I'm not as pleased with Rob Delatorre's art as I was with Molenaar's. It was alright, but didn't feel like he drew good fight scenes. Maybe it was that they were fighting such large creatures, but there wasn't really of sense of how they were doing the damage they did. Ultimately, it feels like the next one-shot will illuminate what exactly is going on, but it may not. And then I may never know what's going on. I suppose that's the risk of reading comics like this. Still, it was moderately enjoyable, so 2.5 out of 5.
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