Comic Book Review – DC vs. Vampires

DC vs. Vampires Volume One (2022)
Reprints DC vs. Vampires #1-6
Written by James Tynion IV and Matthew Rosenberg
Art by Otto Schmidt, Simone Di Meo, and Daniele Di Meo

DC vs. Vampires Volume Two (2023)
Reprints DC vs. Vampires #7-12
Written by James Tynion IV and Matthew Rosenberg
Art by Otto Schmidt, Francesco Mortarino, and Daniele Di Nuculo

Try as I might, I have never really enjoyed vampires as a horror concept. I’ve watched many vampire films of varying quality; some I have liked, but the vampire aspect isn’t scary. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a wonderfully made film, and Dracula is certainly creepy at moments, but I never felt scared of him. Vampires typically seemed to be used to explore ideas of titillating sexuality, which is fine if you’re into that. I don’t really think most of the classic monsters are all that scary, to be honest. Overexposure has demystified them to the point where they are cartoon characters. So when I picked up this Elseworlds comic series, my expectations were relatively low despite the creative talent behind it.

It begins with the infamous DC Universe vampire Andrew Bennett (I, Vampire), showing up at the Hall of Justice. He’s come to warn the Justice League about Mary, Queen of Blood, and how she unleashes a horde of new vampires upon the world. The Legion of Doom has already been attacked, and most have changed. After Bennett tells his story, one member of the League is revealed to have already been turned and proceeds to kill Bennett, as well as another team member. Meanwhile, Batman receives a letter Bennett sent in secret, suspecting there was a mole. Bats assembles the Bat Family as they devise a plan to deal with the coming infection waves of vampires. 

By the time we get to the story’s second half, this has failed, and a massive swath of metahumans, heroes & villains have been turned into vampires. Some of DC’s heaviest hitters are now on the side of evil while a resistance is mounted, led by Green Arrow & Supergirl, among others. I became suspicious as I neared that we would not get a definitive conclusion. Sure enough, the larger problem remains, with only a tiny arc being resolved. Wouldn’t you know it? At the NY Comic Con, DC announced another mini-series in this universe as part of their Elseworlds imprint refresh. Much like the Batman: White Knight stories, this appears to be a new IP for DC to exploit.

One of my biggest criticisms of the story was that as soon as a person is turned into a vampire, they become evil. Why? Andrew Bennett is a vampire and isn’t a bad guy. I can think of some explanations like new vampires are overwhelmed by the bloodlust, and only with special training over time can they learn to control it. That would sound like a reasonable rule in this scenario. The story doesn’t even try to justify it. The way it goes is, let’s say Superman is bit and immediately turns bad rather than engage in any sort of struggle between his human empathy and this new insidious infection. That would be an interesting story. We get a lot of Sturm und Drang that equivocates to kids smashing their action figures together in battle.

I know this is Elseworlds, so it allows for some dramatic license, but many of these well-known characters are written as if their personalities haven’t been well-defined over the decades. I could excuse if this were a pair of amateur writers, but this is James Tynion IV and Matthew Rosenberg. Tynion has a tremendous amount of work under his belt with many of these characters. Rosenberg, I know mainly from his Marvel work, but he’s clearly a fan of DC, too, so he should know the voices of Batman and Wonder Woman, for instance.

I don’t usually nitpick these kinds of things, but turning Superman into a vampire should be far more challenging than it is in this story. That’s part of the fun of telling a vampire story in an established superhero universe; you have to think of how the rules that guide these characters can mesh with the rules around vampirism. What interest conflicts could there be between them? Instead, Tynion & Rosenberg seem to gloss over what is inconvenient to have more scenes of human heroes & villains fighting with vampiric ones, sequences where I tend to forget the main objective even is because everything is so cluttered with action. 

Because this title was clearly developed as an IP to keep milking, I began to feel the refusal to conclude the story the further I got into it. Apparently, DC put out another mini-series and a pair of one-shots during this main mini-series being published. I would not go out of my way to find and read those when the core story felt lacking. What about this concept is worth continuing? What unique & exciting stories can be told in this setting that are worth more mini-series? I get the sense there was supposed to be a finite ending, but at the last minute, an editor saw the potential to keep spinning this off, and so here we are. 

Monsters & superheroes can work together; you need a strong enough premise to hang the story on. DC vs. Vampires seems to have just had a title, and assumed the story would write itself from there. I enjoy Elseworlds when they are well thought out; many of them over the decades have not been. This is another case of that. Those early stories would be contained to a one-shot or mini-series, making them more excusable. Stretching something already so thin is like writing with the intent to see how long you can keep people buying a thing before they stop rather than tell a memorable, captivating story.