Impaler Cover
© Harms
Issue: 1
Publisher: Image
Authors: William Harms, Nick Postick, Nick Marinkovich
Price: $2.99
Impaler
By: Kurt AmackerReview Date: Saturday, October 28, 2006
William Harms begins his new ongoing series, IMPALER, with a horror noir tale of the old world colliding with the new. In the year 1460, Wallachian Prince Vlad Dracula undergoes an unholy ritual to save his land from the vampires overrunning his armies. We see little following the ritual, but know that the past will wreak havoc on the future when a ship recently back from Morocco pulls into a harbor in New York City full of dead bodies. Something evil has returned with the ship from an archaeological dig. At the same time, Victor Dailey finishes the paperwork to begin his early retirement from the NYPD. After losing his wife to breast cancer, he only wants to move to Florida and live alone. Unfortunately, something rises up from the autopsy table at the city morgue that will likely delay him.
After the introduction, Harms doesn’t bring Dracula into the issue. But, given the series’s title, we can rest assured he’ll arrive shortly to combat the evil that once plagued Wallachia. The bulk of the issue feels like a cop show with a supernatural twist. I don’t mean that disparagingly, because Harms dwells on Dailey’s grief more than crime scene details. He infuses the story with a welcome humanity that keeps it from turning into C.S.I. with vampires or a BUFFY knock-off. In that regard, he foretells the complexity and amorality that will likely define his characters in future issues. While the issue feels quick and covers less narrative ground than it could, it offers an enticing look at things to come.
Nick Postick and Nick Marinkovich both worked on vampires before IMPALER, drawing the very nice looking, but badly written, UNDERWORLD comics from IDW. They bring an appropriately bleak and brooding atmosphere to the vampiric proceedings. A black haze lingers over practically everything. Given their moody artwork and Harms’s mournful protagonist in Victor Dailey, this book would probably just be depressing without the horror elements to scare it up a little.
IMPALER begins a new ongoing at Image that, one hopes, can do for vampires what THE WALKING DEAD did for zombies. Pick this one up.
Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think at comicscape@mania.com.
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