HBO’s True Blood has been a huge success, no doubt due in part to the Vampire craze that’s plagued the nation since Twilight hit the scene. It might be slightly more overplayed than mixing zombies with our favorite Sci-Fi series, but that certainly won’t stop anyone from watching the show — or, reading the comic. That’s right, IDW has picked up the license to the hit show and will now be publishing the True Blood comics. The first issue should be available in stores now, but a special edition is available at San Diego Comic Con with a limited edition wrap-around cover. The comic should continue the on-going adventures of Sookie Stackhouse and her lover Bill. No word on if the series will actually feature any cannon storylines, but I imagine it won’t unless the producers get involved.
Apparently tired of their own boring and ubiquitous banner ads, Ancestry.com decided to try a more novel approach to publicity, more in the time-honored tradition of tabloids and Perez Hilton: release interesting information about celebrities. Rather than go about peeping in windows, however, Ancestry.com used its own database to discover that Robert Pattinson, aka “that guy who plays the vampire in Twilight, the book/movie franchise designed to sexually arouse 13-year-old girls,” is in fact related to Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula.
The funny part, of course, being that anyone who has the slightest understanding of genealogy or of how long ago ol’ Vladdie lived knows that you might be too! Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jun 4, 2010 in Comic Books
I can just see the meeting where the demography folks break out their PowerPoint and announce that “if we want to gain a female readership we gotta have vampires!” And to be fair women love vampires — so how can you go wrong? Well looking at the above cover of the Marvel one shot Death of Dracula you can drive a stake through its heart. Clearly what the art director didn’t get is that vampires are really all about romance, yet what you’ve got here looks like a bad parody of a 50s pulp magazine. But wait it gets worse, here are the character designs by the talented Marko Djurdjevic who seems to be channeling the worse elements of Elfquest and DEVO: Read more…
I must admit that I’m not exactly a historical fiction buff, but when I heard about Seth Grahame-Smith’s recently released novel, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I must admit that the concept piqued my interest. Of course, it wasn’t until I stumbled across this amazing trailer for the novel that I found myself compelled to buy a copy. I’m still in the process of reading it, so I can’t comment too much on the content, aside from my assurance that it isn’t Twilight. Read more…
There’s always been something very haunting about the eyes of Blythe dolls so it’s highly appropriate that we’d see a vampire Blythe sooner or later. Although what I didn’t expect to see were these two Disney Blythes which celebrate the classic films Dumbo and Pinocchio: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 2, 2010 in Comic Books
Being a manga fanboy the release of Devil #1 immediately caught my eye: “Manga artist Torajiro Kishi (Maka-Maka) and blockbuster anime studio Madhouse (Trigun, Paprika, Ninja Scroll) love comics. So much so that they’ve decided to publish an original, Western-style comic exclusively with Dark Horse! Enter Devil, a thrilling, sci-fi take on the vampire genre.” Read more…
This film looks silly, stupid and dumb — but I’ve got to see it! Yeah sure the plot reminds me a bit too much of Buffy meets The Lost Boys but that passes with me if you do it with a good sense of humor, and seeing John C. Reilly on the screen makes me feel sort of happy from the get go. And then add Salma Hayek doing her goth thing and we know we’re going to have some fun here. The Vampire’s Assistant opens on October 23rd.
On this day in 1960 the British film The Brides of Dracula made it’s American debut. The film was produced by the beloved Hammer Film Productions which did some amazing horror and science fiction work in the 50s with films like The Quatermass Xperiment and The Curse of Frankenstein. Although by 1959 they started to revert to sequels and by 1974 had produced a total of 9 Dracula flicks. Of course in this case the Dracula title is slightly dishonest as the lead vampire Baron Meinster (played by handsome David Peel) was in fact just a mere disciple of Count Dracula as seen in this trailer: Read more…
The most depressing thing about this trailer is that awful cover version of a Kate Bush song that kicks in about a minute and a half into this trailer! Until that point I was willing to give yet another vampire flick a chance, but ruining a musical icon ruins everything for me. Well in any case Daybreakers will come out in January 2010 so perhaps they’ll have time to fix the soundtrack. Here’s an overview of the plot: Read more…
