Laurell K. Hamilton & Stacie M. Ritchie
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2
Average rating: 3.0 of 5
The first issue in a solid comic book adaptation of the first Anita Blake novel 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.
Laurell K. Hamilton might be unwilling to go back to the glory days of Anita Blake, but fans can re-experience how great things were at the beginning with the first issue in the Dabel Brothers' 12-part adaptation of the first novel, "Guilty Pleasures," for Marvel, which is being scripted by Stacie M. Ritchie with artwork by Brett Booth. Our penguin-loving heroine has already made her reputation as "The Executioner," sanctioned by the government to kill vampires in a world where vampires are were-creatures are now legal U.S. citizens with constitutional rights and social security numbers that will apparently never be recycled. Anita's day job is as an animator for Animator, Inc., raising the dead for profits more than fun in the great St. Louis area. She also works with the local Preternatural Squad (a.k.a. the Spook Squad) as an expert on vampires and other supernatural beings.
"Guilty Pleasures" begins with Anita being approached to investigate some murders. Four vampires have been slaughtered in the new vampire club district (vampires are very entrepreneurial) and in a way she is already working on the case since she is giving the police al the help she can. But Anita does not work for vampires. Then Anita goes to a surprise bachelorette party for her friend Catharine Maison at Guilty Pleasures, a vampire strip club, run by the master vampire Jean-Claude. Suffice it to say that things do not go well in this opening chapter. What you have here is most exposition, but which might be problematic since you would expect that the vast majority of readers who pick up this comic book are going to be die-hard fans of the series. But neophytes will be able to get up to speed and the rest of us can revel in taking an illustrated walk down memory lane to the first time we read one of these books and became hooked. No matter how much disdain we might have for the current course of the series as it wallows more in soft-core sex than hard-core horror, our affection for those first Anita Black novels has not dimmed.
Ritchie does an excellent job of sticking not just to Hamilton's plot, but her dialogue as well. In an interview Ritchie reported that: "Ms. Hamilton has all final say on character designs, art, and the scripts. She is very active in making sure that her universe is conveyed correctly." Booth, best known for his work on "Backlash" at the Wildstorm Studios, has a style that is well suited to the world of Anita Black, although he has to make some alterations in Anita Blake's hairstyle to desl with all those curls (one of which will apparently alwys curl down on her forehead between her eyes). Fortunately Anita's skin does not stay as white as it is early on in this first issue, and if you see some of the covers of other issues know that the vampires do not have the alabaster white skin you see with Jean-Claude on the cover of #2.
The contract between Dabel Brothers and Hamilton is for the first five Anita Blake books, so after "Guilty Pleasures" we can look forward to "The Laughing Corpse)," "Circus of the Damned," "The Lunatic Cafe," and "Bloody Bones." Of course we will have to wait to see if Booth hangs around to do the artwork as long as Ritchie writes the adaptations. Hamilton apparently cleared Ritchie for the project, so my assumption would be she will script all five, but what do I know? At this point I just want Ritchie and Booth to stick around for the second novel, "The Laughing Corpse," because the end game of that one is my favorite of the Anita Blake novels and I want to see how Booth illustrates the scene that I always thought would make a movie version end up with an X-rating for violence and not sex.
Shown above is the wrap around cover of Anita in a graveyard with a whole lotta zombies coming out of the ground of the front, underscoring that she might be called a Vampire Hunter but in these books she makes her living as an animator, with the back adding a passel of were-animals to the proceedings. The second printing offers a variant cover depicting Anita by herself, dressed in black including a t-shirt that proclaims "Zombies are cool" around the figure of a zombie penguin (a version of the original cover serves as the back cover). The variant cover for the third printing is one of the dancers at Guilty Pleausres with long blonde hair, but there is also a Greg Horn 1/10 variant cover of Anita with gun drawn and a Booth sketch of Anita for a special New York Comics Convention version cover. I actually like the second printing cover a bit more because it fits it better with the other covers, at least for the six issues that have been printed to date, because with one exception they have all been similar in featuring one character (the cover of #2 is the poster of Jean-Claude that is available).
Editorial Review:
In a world where Vampires, Zombies and Werewolves have been declared legal citizens of the United States, Anita Blake is an animator - a profession that involves raising the dead for mourning relatives. But Anita is also known as a fearsome hunter of criminal vampires, and shes often employed to investigate cases that are far too much for conventional police.
But as Anita gains the attention of the vampire masters of her hometown of St. Louis, she also risks revealing an intriguing secret about herself - the source of her unusual strength and power. Anita is apprehensive about being approached by a vampire to investigate a series of gruesome murders - after all, shed rather have nothing to do with anything baring fangs. But a bachelorette party at the Guilty Pleasures nightclub brings her into contact with a whole group of vampires - including one who wont take no for an answer. But with her weapons and holy items checked at the door, can Anita withstand his power?
