A team of heroic blood-sucking vampires teams up with iconic Marvel heroes like Spider-Man, the X-Men, and Captain America to take down a demonically evil Big Bad… if this sounds like your cup of tea, then the Unforgiven trade paperback is truly perfect for you. Chock-full of gorgeous art, brutal battles, emotional moments of growth, and glimpses at your favorite heroes in unfamiliar settings, the 3-part Unforgiven event is perfect for fans of monsters, mayhem, and a whole lot of drama.
Marvel Comics
Collecting Spider-Man: Unforgiven, X-Men: Unforgiven, and Captain America: Unforgiven – all from writer Tim Seeley, artist Sid Kotian, colorist Edgar Delgado, and letterer Joe Caramagna – the collected trade paperback features the return of the heroic vampires known as the Forgiven, a band of vampires led by their leader Raizo Kodo who debuted in 2011’s Fear Itself crossover event. Inspired years earlier by Captain America, Raizo dedicated his life to being a heroic vampire, not killing humans without cause, as well as gathering more vampires to join his unique clan. The Forgiven famously took in and trained Jubilation Lee of the X-Men after she was turned into a vampire, which is beautifully worked into the X-Men: Unforgiven issue. Major highlights of the series are the main enemies of the Spider-Man and X-Men stories respectively, Salomé and the Curator, both terrifying and horrific monsters that turned the issues into real horror stories, as well as an interesting connection throughout to Scarlet Witch’s recent defeat of Chthon in Darkhold.
Unforgiven starts out strong, with a really brutal and devastating twist at the end of its first issue – something I personally did not see coming. While both the first issue featuring Spider-Man and the final issue featuring Captain America were incredible, the middle issue X-Men: Unforgiven is where the story really shines. Granted, I am a major X-Men fan, but I think the fact that the story involved so much of Krakoan X-Men politics and ideology, making the story so specific to the X-Men in their current time and place (whereas Spider-Man and Captain America’s stories could have taken place at really any time), plus the relationship Jubilee had with the Forgiven gave the story a really intimate and meaningful feeling. This is also the issue where the Forgiven are dealing with the grief and fallout of the major betrayal they experienced at the end of the first issue, and Seeley writes their pain, anger and confusion in a heartbreaking manner.
Marvel Comics
The Unforgiven trade paperback also collects the one-shot issue Blade: Vampire Nation, a really fascinating murder-mystery thriller from writer Mark Russel, artist Dave Wachter, and colorist Dee Cunniffe that stars Blade in his new role as Sheriff of Dracula’s Vampire Nation in Russia. The issue itself is really fun, a great glimpse into the nation of Vampyrsk that Dracula has formed since its official recognition by the UN, plus Blade and Dracula’s interactions are always hilarious. The major issue, and strangely enough the biggest issue for me with the entire collection holistically, is that the cover of the Unforgiven trade paperback features the cover for Blade: Vampire Nation…
If I was reviewing a single issue comic, this wouldn’t be an issue, but this is a review of the Unforgiven collection as a whole, and it is simply so distracting that the title of the book is Unforgiven, and yet the cover features Blade and Dracula, who don’t appear once in the Unforgiven event. The main cover of Spider-Man: Unforgiven is on the back of the book, and the end of the collection features a wide array of absolutely gorgeous variant covers from the event, so it begs the question… why would Marvel put Blade: Vampire Nation as the cover? Was it simply a marketing ploy, since Blade is a popular character?
Marvel Comics
However, Spider-Man is inarguably a way bigger character, so having him on the cover would have been a no brainer. It might sound like I am nitpicking this issue, but I feel like it would have been a lot more respectful if Marvel had decided to make the cover one of the ones from the actual event, featuring gorgeous art by Kyle Hotz and Dan Brown. The Blade: Vampire Nation cover from Valerio Giangiordano and Chris O’Halloran is undoubtedly a beautiful cover, and would make the perfect cover for a Blade-focused trade paperback. While comics covers are often known to “lie” about the actual content of the comic, at the end of the day this cover was a distracting choice, and some readers may leave feeling duped.
The reason I feel so passionate about this is because I truly think that the Unforgiven event is enjoyable and worthy of praise, both for its unique story and dialogue by Seeley and its dynamic and brutal art from Kotian and Delgado. While this has been highlighted in other reviews, it is important to note just how well Seeley captures the voices of the classic Marvel heroes he works into these three separate but connected stories, perfectly utilizing Spider-Man, the X-Men, and Captain America in their engagement with the Forgiven. The event deserves to stand on its own two feet, and it would have been really great to see one of the actual Unforgiven covers featured on the front, especially since those covers by Hotz and Brown are so beautifully grim and terrifying, they would no doubt immediately draw in any fan of horror, vampires, or the iconic Marvel heroes they feature.
The Unforgiven trade paperback is a monstrously enjoyable collection of the Unforgiven event, featuring incredible storytelling from Tim Seeley with beautiful art and color from Sid Kotian and Edgar Delgado to back it up, and the inclusion of Blade: Vampire Nation as a back up story was a smart one. Anyone who is a fan of vampire tales, heroic “monsters,” Marvel horror, or classic heroes teaming up with unlikely allies should absolutely pick up Unforgiven, knowing that while Blade is included in a back-up, this is not a Blade event.
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