Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Guilty Pleasures Volume 1
Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Guilty Pleasures Volume 1, by Laurell K Hamilton & Brett Booth, Marvel/Dabel Brothers
BASED ON Laurell K Hamilton’s novels and bearing the same name as the first novel in the series, I don’t know how similar it is to that debut story but I can tell you Anita Blake is "an animator", a women able to raise the dead, but who moonlights as a vampire hunter in a United States of America where being a supernatural creature isn’t illegal but doing the kind of things such creatures are apt to in the dead of night is.
The books are best-sellers and there’s apparently a TV show in the works. You can see why. Since Christopher Lee came on as Prince Charming with fangs, the sexual allure of vampires have always been a selling point, Anne Rice took that up several notches with the release of Interview With A Vampire and you’ve got several variations on that theme for the current generation; chief among them Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight but with enough room for many more successes such as Hamilton’s Anita Blake which adds a female detective schtick to the genre.
This book collect issues 1-6 of a comic book series, and by its hardcover nature you know that is what its long-term intention was: to reach a mainstream book readership not just comic fans. As such, three writers are involved in adapting the story, and you can tell where each one changes stylistically even though there’s a strong editorial feel directing the story presented. Booth’s art doesn’t appeal to me here as straight imagery; the pictures within the frames can be over-rendered, despite this it works remarkably well as sequential art though it does tend towards posing figures which also leads me to presume this is an editorial decision to heighten the romantic sexual allure that its more familiar book readers may want to see – However, the reason they’ve got her with a white face on the edition of the cover I read may well be a marketing decision hoping comic book readers will mistake her for Death from The Sandman series.
Anyway, what we have inside is a chick-lit Gothic romance detective story wherein Anita Blake is compromised into finding out who’s killing vampires illegally. Despite finding myself ticking off reasons why this book shouldn’t appeal to me it still had me seduced into following it through to the end, which makes the fact that it doesn’t conclude within this collection a major disappointment – If you buy a hardback book I seriously don’t think you should expect it to be a part work.
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