The Sun Never Sets on the British Vampire

Captain Britain and MI-13 #15

Siiiigh. Yet another outstanding comic book gets cancelled.

The final issue of this series also concludes the “Vampire State” storyline. Though Count Dracula and his vampire army have been thrown into disarray, they haven’t been beaten yet… but they’re a lot closer to defeat than they really expected. See, Pete Wisdom has been thinking about a dozen moves ahead of Dracula, most importantly about one little, important piece of misdirection — when Dracula destroyed the skull of Quincy Harker, the relic that kept all vampires out of England… he’d really only destroyed a fake. With Captain Britain battling Dracula’s pet necromancer, and Meggan showing up to sow dissent among the vampiric army, Dracula is completely unprepared when all his vampires start bursting into flame. He retreats to what he thinks is a safe position, only to get attacked by the S.A.S. and a whole bunch of guest stars. And it all comes down to Faiza Hussain, physician, superhero fangirl, and wielder of Excalibur, to take on Dracula in the final showdown.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Man alive, am I going to miss this comic. As always, beautifully created characters, fantastic plotting, so much wonder and excitement. The last three pages of this issue are the best farewell to the readers that I can imagine. Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk created an awfully fine comic — I wish they could’ve kept it going for much, much longer.

Power Girl #3

Power Girl ends up settling Ultra-Humanite’s hash pretty quickly in this issue — in fact, she accidentally roasts him like a hot dog. After that, she and Terra have to figure out how to set Manhattan back down without wrecking everything, and then PeeGee has to try to get Ultra’s ship down safely, without either wrecking New York or dropping into the ocean and causing catastrophic waves.

Verdict: I’ll give it a thumbs up, though the biggest feat is performed by Terra, a guest star… and I’m still a bit irritated that Ultra-Humanite is depicted as an over-the-top sexist. His best-known host, other than the giant albino gorilla, has been Dolores Winters, the fictional film star he transplanted his brain into during the Golden Age. And he’s always struck me as a villain whose primary prejudice was that he thought he was superior to everyone, and that only he had what it took to rule the world. He may hate women — but in fact, he hates them just as much as he hates men. Still, pretty good action and as always, excellent artwork by Amanda Conner.