After Dawn of a New Era, Clevinger and Wegener switched from monthly physical comics to a strictly online release. Which has never been my jam, and since the website requires I either subscribe or drop my ad blocker, neither of which are things I'm wont to do, I was at a bit of an impasse. Fortunately, they do release hardback collections of the mini-series. The Vengeful Dead is the only collection they have from after Dawn of a New Era from what I can tell on their website. Since I don't know when there might be another, let's talk about this.
Vengeful Dead finds Tesladyne mourning the apparent death of Bernard, while also trying to render their dimension - or at least their Earth - immune to attacks from the Vampire Dimension. Foley is still trying to get the students - now including ALAN - to learn to work as a team. Jenkins is trying to prepare everyone to fend off an invasion. Robo is trying to fend off Richard Branson's continued grousing about the noise.
(One thing I'll note here, Wegener draws Branson in a way that I found recognizable. I have a general idea of what the guy looks like, noticeable beard, vaguely leathery face, and this version is close enough. In Dawn of a New Era, Vik and Lang thwart Branson's HOA shenanigans by getting the other member, Twitter/SpaceX Boy, to vote in their favor, under threat of not letting him use Tesla's name for his cars. Wegener's version looks nothing like the actual putz. Not sure why.)
The students struggle to focus on both their actual assignment - improve the output of the facility's solar array - and what is mathematically possible for them to achieve. I still struggle keeping their names straight beyond Ben being The Guy, but they're at least developing more distinct personalities. Margot's the overachiever/perfectionist, Ben's easily distracted and sarcastic, Olivia's morally flexible and a little cynical. It's something.
The best bit is the friendship between Jenkins and ALAN. They spend a lot of time monitoring the vampires' attempts to breach the protective barrier around the planet, and Jenkins eventually gives ALAN a codename: Laughing Scorpion. Because he's funny. By Jenkins' standards. It's fun to see Jenkins' hyper-serious, all-go no-quit, attitude played off ALAN's knowledgeable but naive perspective. Because ALAN is either asking honest questions that sound sassy, or clever enough to disguise his sass within those questions:
Jenkins: Did you have an exit strategy for disobeying my orders?
ALAN: Are you asking because you didn't have an exit strategy for obeying them?
Jenkins: That's classified.
The vampires are not only repelled through ridiculous science, they can, I think, safely be written off as a threat going forward. This via an entirely different bit of ridiculous science. Ridiculously awesome science. And don't Neil Degrasse Tyson me about cheapening the word, if someone could actually pull that stunt off, it would be awe-inspiring. An artificially designed ley line field, powered by the Earth's motion around the Sun, hurling a bullet train through a breach in dimensions at nearly the speed of light at a planet full of vampires.
Except if this happened in our world, they'd probably screw up, hit Earth and doom us all. That aside, I especially like the panel where it shows what's happening, with a strikethrough the words "Vampire Earth."
Bernard shows up looking like he escaped one of Jack Kirby's stranger stories. Given the character commanding the vampires was introduced with Bernard (in volume 4, Other Strangeness), it's fitting. How far both of them have come from that point where their paths first, briefly, crossed. ALAN gets to learn some things about living among humans he never expected, or probably wanted, to learn. And, if the final panel is any indication, Tesladyne is set to get a new instructor/headache.
Most of the vampires are an indistinguishable mass, but the only one that really matters is Vampiricus Rex, so that's fine. Wegener draws him as appropriately beefy to look good tossing Robo around like a sassy sack of laundry. The rest are just there as a general threat the others have to fend off until the plan can take effect. The stuff that matters is there in loving detail from Wegener and Chavis, whose colors are a lot brighter than some of the later IDW mini-series were. Colors in those tended towards muted, often muddy tones, that sometimes overwhelmed Wegener's pencils entirely. Maybe he just has more time this way to focus on individual pages, but Wegener's art is pretty strong here. He's refined his style to where it's more efficient, a bit simpler, but still detailed in the places it needs to be.
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