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Blood Feud #4
Released by: Oni Press
Released on: January 20th, 2016.
Written by: Cullen Bunn
Illustrated by: Drew Moss, Nick Filardi
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The hills are full of tarantulas. The hills are full of vampires. Who knew the Ozarks were so exotic? Certainly not R.F. Coven and his pals Jack Siever and Sue Hatchell. Recently they've seen their friend Seth Stubbs turned into a vampire and had to kill their buddy Cecil to stop him from turning into a bloodsucker too, all at the hands of the Whatley clan.
When this forth issue starts up, our three heroes are standing face to face with a vampiric monster, a fast moving beast that would just as soon suck their blood as look at them. But the monster splits, and it splits fast - off to get reinforcements, they assume. Things are bad. These guys are out-numbered and may or may not be surrounded. They head into town but Spider Creek is a ghost town, inhabited only by hordes of those aforementioned tarantulas - but very few corpses, which means the vampires turned the townsfolk into… vampires. Not good. There's no phone service, no electricity…. it's pretty much empty. The first stop on a national, or even international, tour for the vampires?
Oddly enough, the town church is still in good shape. They try to head inside but it's locked up real tight, and when Sue turns around, she's got some bad news. They've been followed, those vampires are really just hanging out on the other side of the street waiting. The vampires move forward and the doors open just in time, some of the townsfolk are alive and well and currently calling the Lord's house home. They're also well armed and reasonably happy to return fire. One of the survivors, Annie, is really happy to see that R.F. is alive and well - but outside the vampires, they go quiet. Too quiet.
They hang out in the church until the sunlight rises, at which point they open the door and, not surprisingly ,the vampires are gone. Annie and a few others, with R.F.'s pistol in hand, load up the 4x4 and hit the road to find help. But out three heroes, they stick around. Can't rightly leave the home town in a mess like this, right? Time to take out the trash. But Jack, he's still got that bite to contend with…
This issue sort of conjures up memories of John Carpenter's Vampires, without really ripping that movie off. There's a very different slant to the way that R.F. and company go about cleaning up this mess, sans the machismo that James Woods and his crew brought to a similar situation. But there are similarities too - there's a 'master' that needs to be taken care of, there are deadly vampires around every corner, and there are heavily armed humans cocked and ready to take care of whatever might come their way. This comic works on the same level - it's suspenseful, it's sometimes quite dark and other times very bloody, but at the same time it has a nice sense of humor to it that makes it fun to read. Bunn's script takes us into some dark territory but not so dark that it's a downer. The emphasis here seems to be on the adventure behind the horror as much as it is the horror itself and the quirky, well written characters that inhabit this world make that approach all the more effective.
The artwork from Drew Moss and Nick Filardi is, once again, cartoonish enough to make the humor work but detailed and stoic enough to make the more horrific aspects of the story hit home with an appropriate thump. The colors are applied well, the monsters well drawn and honestly eerie, while the small town backdrop is illustrated with the right amount of authenticity. The end result? Good scary comic book fun. This is a great read, top marks for all involved.
