Blood Type #1, written by Corinna Bechko with art by Andrea Sorrentino and colors by Dave Stewart, picks up immediately after the events of the short story “Blood Type” from Epitaphs from the Abyss #3. Missed that issue? No problem. To summarize: Ada the Vampire, escaping from a sinking yacht on an inflatable raft with a group of survivors, drifts in the middle of the ocean, as Ada feeds on their blood one by one until no one’ s left but her. Fortunately, a vessel passes by and rescues her.
And that’s where Blood Type #1 begins, with Ada being rescued by a much bigger boat than she was on before, which means a lot more victims to feed on. And she’s starving.
As usual for Ada though, things don’t go smoothly. The charm powers she uses to “tame” certain people, thinking they’ll be useful servants, ends up just giving her useless hangers-on who don’t give her a moment’s peace and ultimately prove to be incompetent and a nuisance.
Such is the case with the captain of the vessel that rescues her, who’s more like the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island than Horatio Hornblower. Watching him chase her around the ship like a needy puppy dog as she gets increasingly annoyed is more entertaining than it should be.
The bulk of the issue takes place on a Caribbean island, where Ada stakes out the island and is excited at the prospect of having an endless number of natives and vacationers to feed on, until she finds out there’s another vampire (maybe a horde of them?) occupying the island too. What’s a misanthropic vampire supposed to do?
Vampires these days are much like zombies – they’ve been used in film and literature so much that they’ve nearly oversaturated everything.
Fortunately, writer Corinna Bechko makes Ada a devilishly different character, separating her from the multitude of vampires we’ve seen before. Ada’s totally anarchic, having no rules except doing whatever she can to survive and sleep. She has the true freedom of someone who’s neither bound by society’s rules nor her own conscience, and it makes her strangely appealing. There’s a joy and an exuberance in her depravity and disregard for everyone around her that’s pretty infectious.
Her biggest flaw, unsurprisingly, is that she’s terribly impulsive and mercurial. She doesn’t believe in making plans or thinking ahead, which comically works against her at points during this issue.
I loved Andrea Sorrentino’s art here – his style is like a fusion of Jae Lee and Geoff Darrow’s work. It combines Darrow’s painstaking detail and innovative panel layouts with a hint of Lee’s darkly grotesque figure drawing. One double-page splash page at the climax of the issue is especially striking, with Ada being chased up a mountain by a group intent on killing her. The massive cliff is overlayed with panels in the shape of bats, each panel showing one of her desperate pursuers. It’s one of many beautiful images throughout the book and I look forward to seeing more of Sorrentino’s art in the future.
The book sets up a couple of great mysteries, teasing the monstrous vampires that haunt the island and also delivering a great cliffhanger ending. If Blood Type continues keeping Ada edgy and merciless and doesn’t water her down over time, Oni will have a successful series and a potentially legendary character on their roster who they can build stories around for years to come. Ada the vampire is a uniquely anarchic character, much different from other vampire characters of the past, and she makes the book a compelling read.
