PINOCCHIO, VAMPIRE SLAYER
VOLUME 3: OF WOOD AND BLOOD Van Jensen and Dustin Higgins
REVIVAL #1
Tim Seeley and Mike Norton
EERIE COMICS #1 Various
THE INFERNAL
MAN-THING #1 OF 3 Steve Gerber and Kevin Nowlan
HOAX HUNTERS #1
Michael Morenci, Steve Seeley and Axel Medellin
HELLBLAZER #292 Peter Milligan and Simon Bisley
W
hen we last left Van Jensen and Dustin Higgins’ bloodsucker-staking version of Pinocchio (RM#106), he had escaped the Great Puppet Theatre with his newfound
puppet friends and had finally been turned into a real boy. But his joy was short-lived, as the love of his life, real girl Carlotta, was kidnapped by vampire pirates and Pinocchio was left adrift at sea. Almost two years later comes Pinocchio:
Vampire Slayer Volume 3: Of Wood and Blood (out now from SLG Publishing), the final chapter in the puppet’s odyssey. The concept of fusing horror and fairy tales was quite novel back in 2009, when the first volume appeared. Since then, however, it has become decidedly main- stream, with movies such as Snow White and the Huntsman gracing the big screen and pop- ular new TV shows, including Grimm, making in- roads in prime time. “It’s really funny looking back now,” says
Jensen. “When I was writing the first book, the vampire craze hadn’t started, and the glut of fairy tale stuff was several years off. I don’t claim to be smart enough to understand why these trends start, but I think it probably is just cyclical. Fairy tales are primal sto- ries. They speak to deep truths, and so they are always rele- vant.” Trailblazers or not,
Jensen and artist Hig- gins have neverthe- less crafted an epic journey for the little puppet. What could have been a one-note punchline – Pinocchio lies, nose grows, snaps nose and uses as stake, kills vampire, repeat – has instead grown to be a sprawling saga filled with loss, love and acceptance, albeit one that’s sprinkled with plenty of vamp slaying. Of Wood and Blood,brings the journey to a
RM54
close in a story so grand it’s being published in two parts. On his quest to rescue Carlotta, Pinocchio finally discovers his true origins and confronts the ultimate figure in vampire lore, Vlad Tepes. But this Vlad is no mere stand-in for Dracula. “This series has been about
going back to the historic and folk- loric accounts of vampirism, so it made sense to also offer a histor- ically based version of Vlad Tepes,” says Jensen. “I think the modern conception of vampires is entirely shaped by Stoker’s Dracula, and of course that also largely shaped the way people think of Vlad. But the true Vlad is much different and much more complicated. He was a harsh, awful man in many re- spects. But he’s also a hero to the people of his region, so the story is very complicated. What I really liked was creating a villain who essentially does these evil things because he’s scared of death.” Mortality has been a
central theme of the overall story as Pinocchio spends a great deal of the books seek- ing “true” life – that is, a flesh-and- blood body. Surprisingly, this goal is achieved not at the very end of the tale as one would expect, but rather part- way through the second volume. “That was a big risk, definitely,” ad-
mits Jensen. “It takes away the cool- ness factor, since now Pinocchio isn’t a puppet and doesn't have the endless supply of stakes. He’s just a regular guy. But that change fit into the larger
story arc we’d planned for the character. Our hope was that we'd told a good enough story that our readers would be invested enough in the character that they cared about what hap- pened to him, puppet or human.”
Now a real boy, Pinocchio battles the undead flesh and blood of Vlad Tepes. A large part of the story’s success is Higgins’
art, which becomes grander in scale as the story moves from an isolated European village where Pinocchio fights a handful of vampires, to a lit- eral battle, where Vlad‘s vampire horde fights Pinocchio’s army of wooden allies. “One of my favourite things about the book is
how you can see Van’s writing and my drawing style evolving,” says Higgins. “One of the great aspects about working in this medium is con- stantly learning new approaches to the art form, developing and expanding one’s horizons, and applying it to the work at hand. So, for me, it’s poetic that my art has matured alongside Pinoc- chio’s character as the story progressed. I think it’s kinda cool.”
FOLLOW PEDRO ON TWITTER @PCABEZUELO
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72