Tag: Daerick Gross

The Queen of the Damned comic reaction

Eighties glam rock Lestat

Spoiler warning

While the absence of Lestat as the narrator makes things less immersive than the Vampire Lestat comic…the original Queen of the Damned easily translates into pictures and word balloons, what with the number and diversity of characters, events connected by vast distances and vampires breaking cover. Anyone looking for a straight-laced adaptation would have little to complain about. To the best of my memory of the book…I think every single scene made it into the comic with varying (but admissible) degrees of faithfullness.

The art is neat to. A few scenes, like Maharet visiting Jesse in the hospital, almost remind me of Dave McKean, who would have been a rising star in comics at the time. The scene below reminds me of McKean’s art in Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid, which felt equidistant between genre-savvy comic art and photo-realism. And, of course, a ton of shadows and pale lighting (most of Black Orchid happened at night to).

The degree of realism also roots us in the present of the book- 1984. I was a little surprised by Armand’s twentieth century presentation, here. My impression of Armand (as depicted in the books) was of someone who is recognizably non-binary, erring slightly toward femininity. I grew up in the nineties and early oughties, when those concepts were less well-known, so I’m pretty sure that was a genuine reaction from my teenage brain.

This is where the diminished immersion became a bit more clear to me. When I first read The Queen of the Damned, the relationship between Armand and Daniel was one of the sweetest and most engaging parts of the whole book. That was probably when he started to become one of my favorite characters.

Armand, on the lower right, in the white shirt. Admissible but I don’t think I ever imagined him with hair like that

One thing they could have done was spend more time in the early stages of the rapport, when it was at its most chaotic. The restaurant encounter- when Armand orders literally everything on the menu because he wanted to order for Daniel but didn’t know what he liked -should be its own scene. It’s depicted here but I would have liked to have spent more time in that moment. It also would have been nice to see more of the early, late-night visitations, when Armand surprises him at one in the morning because he wants to talk about the book he saw on Daniel’s nightstand. Or shaking Daniel awake because he wants to talk history and philsophy. Spending more time in the early, uncomfortable stages would have made the tender moments hit harder. To be fair; all of those moments are depicted in the comic but only briefly.

Not endemic to the comic but Anne Rice in general: a lot of her vampire-human relationships are more interesting for not having the moral framing of recent stories. There’s a huge market out there for people who love morally inoffensive vampires. Anne Rice never made any bones, whatsoever, about vampires being non-human beings with non-human perspectives. If Armand and Daniel are an example of the encounter ending (relatively) well then The Tale of the Body Thief shows us both the delicious and horrific possibilities. A happy ending is possible but it can end a million other ways to.

I wonder if Stephanie Meyer would have triggered the backlash she did if she was less eager to make Edward Cullen morally white. I never read Twilight but I saw parts of the movie and it seemed so determined to make Edward cuddly that his predatory, vampiric behavior was just…a bald inconsistency. So when he started doing predatory things to Bella, it smacked of hypocrisy and Meyer’s determination not to acknowledge that darkness raises the spectre of actual, sublimated misogyny.

This was also neat. I really liked the Stan Rice poetry that Anne used as epigraphs so often. The Cannibal poem is the only Stan Rice epigraph here but its usage establishes a nice, solitary and emotional beat before we see Lestat in the arms of Akasha for the first time.

Only eleven of these comics were commercially released before Innovation Comics went under but the twelfth surfaced online last summer.

As of this writing, the portrayal of the final confrontation is the most faithful out of any adaptation (fingers crossed for some later season of the AMC show?).

The Queen of the Damned film didn’t even make an effort. Just a giant vampire brawl.

See…the confrontation in the novel was a debate. Not a single vampire can resist Akasha on their own so they spend most of their energy trying to talk her out of reducing the male population by ninety-percent and assuming autocratic control over the globe. No film studio at the time was going to portray a supervillain that specifically targets men.

What gets lost in translation are the moral stakes. When Lestat wakes up in the twentieth century, he is delighted by the rise of secular humanism and at least some progress being made in gender equality. Those were things he never would have anticipated happening during his human lifetime. He saw humanity begin- however awkwardly -to graduate from the world he once took for granted. This theme reappears when he finds Marius, who believes that the Enlightenment was the greastest step forward the west had taken thus far.

Confronting Akasha was the first time that we got to see this optimism challenged. Marius had some of his most glorious lines in that battle. To paraphrase: humanity has fucked up a lot in both the ancient and modern world. But look at the new ground that was broken in the twentieth century. Do we really want to take humanity’s destiny from them just as they’re starting to peck out of the shell?

The dignity of humanity versus the belief that humans are stupid and helpless and need a stern parent to keep them in line. Yes it’s a debate. Yes a debate is people talking. But it was one of the best scenes Anne Rice ever wrote. No it is not Helm’s Deep but it is a climactic fantasy battle.

The comic keeps it concise: most of the lines are spoken by Akasha, Maharet and Marius. Objectively, you can’t complain. I missed Louis’s appearance, though. In the book he is silent for most of the debate and then butts in assertively. Louis was the weakest vampire present and Lestat was shitting bricks because he thought Akasha was going to incinerate him on principle. Akasha herself appreciates his bravery even if she’s not convinced by him.

That’s my one note for the ending and I guess its more of a nitpick. Otherwise: wonderful comic

Among the portrayals of the Children of the Millennia, Pandora matched my mental image the closest

On issue 12:

https://www.comicartfans.com/galleryroom.asp?gsub=241532

The Vampire Lestat (comic review)

Kudos to my friend Tibbie X for letting me take these off her hands

This is a straight-laced, faithful adaptation. Which does not guarantee success. Worst case scenario (with comics, anyway) is a kind of paraphrasing or summary that is accompanied by pictures rather than taking place within them.

This comic prioritizes the novel’s first person narration and therefore takes heavily from the actual text of the book. To their credit, it looks like Perozich and Gross only wanted to draw the book. Allowances for context between mediums were made but, whenever possible, the text will consist mostly of Anne Rice herself, as Lestat’s internal voice or the various characters.

At the same time, it is not a complete reprint of the book. The first person narration is therefore scaled back whenever the immersion is served better by a purely visual sequence. This is a small thing but it’s a good sign. It says that Perozich and Gross don’t feel like the comic medium is an awkward obstacle that they have to work around rather than with. As good as it is here, though, it wasn’t the visual pacing that won me over.

This is one of the pages that convinced me that Faye Perozich and Daerick Gross were capable of adapting Anne Rice. Or, at least, of conveying one of her vital nuances.

Spoilers ahead, fyi.

There are a few different reasons why The Vampire Lestat is an important lynch pin in The Vampire Chronicles. One of them is that many of the metaphysical basics are established. This includes all the vampiric cryptobiology details as well as other world-building precedents.

The turning of Lestat’s mother is one of these moments. It states explicitly what the relationship dynamics in Interview With The Vampire said implicitly. Transforming into a vampire divests one of the incidentals of human society and makes them relatable as pure individuals.

Or starkly unrelatable and hostile to each other. But when two vampires connect, they connect simply as one soul to another. As he transforms his mother, Lestat feels the baggage of a lifetime of mother-son dynamics fall away and sees Gabrielle for who she truly is, irrespective of her role as a mother or a wife. Ironically, this spiritual nakedness causes new relational roles- that of lovers.

The turning of Nicolas was particularly well done. Earlier, with Gabrielle, the divestment of all human societal roles caused the formation of new roles. For Nicolas, that was exactly what he couldn’t bear.

For comparison, consider how different things were even a short time ago. The panels above depict Lestat’s first reunion with Nicolas after he was transformed by Magnus. Yes, Lestat is a young vampire internally-narrating how living, non-prey humans look. But in the panel with the hug, Lestat feels “a little convulsion of terror”. He’s not hungry because he just fed; he just gorged himself to look more human. One wonders if he was afraid of revealing his otherworldly nature, “and then there was only Nicolas, and I didn’t care.”

The ineffability of such a moment lends credence to the post-vampire awakening, as if there really is a divine spark that shines brightest without the trappings of mortal life.

Once Nicolas is turned, though, he discovers the opposite.

The ineffable sweetness of that reunion only happened because of the love between Nicolas and Lestat as young mortal men. Without that context, the abstraction slowly becomes too much for Nicolas. Gabrielle, meanwhile, luxuriates in the freedom.

None of this is spelled out in as many words; it just unfolds. This, like so much, benefits from the structure of the story.

First, Lestat addresses the reader. In this address, Lestat is in a sustained flashback dialogue with both Gabrielle and Nicolas. Later, the narrative conversation happens between Lestat and Armand who is later replaced with Marius. It ends with a more open and chaotic vignette in the present, like the source material.

The episodic nature of comic releases also worked out for the best. It enables the book to directly foreground things like the tales of Armand and Marius. The usage of color is more stark and contrasting in these stories than in the events set in the narrative “present” of Lestat’s early years in France and Egypt. Armand’s story regularly contrasts bright and dark colors. Marius’s nested stories have eras of vivid colors not typically seen elsewhere. A long, dark blue section is succeeded by purple and black. Both are eventually replaced with vibrant white, orange and yellow. Obviously this is playing on the dramatic immersion in someone’s internal world, with whole chunks of time recalled with distinct and sequential meaning, colored by emotion.

It feels thematically relevant that Marius’s tale in Egypt was- for many vampires -the most eye-catching part of Lestat’s book, music and music videos. With half-formed thoughts of Nicki in the back of his mind, Lestat acts on an impulse to play the violin for Akasha. Akasha offers her blood and Enkil attacks him, yet neither of Those Who Must Be Kept shift out of their white, statue-like torpor. Lestat is now a direct participant in Marius’s tale of the vampiric parents.

The stories of Armand and Marius are colored by the emotions of their narrators yet- because of the meta-narrative in the year 1984 -these stark contrasts add credibility to the reactions of the modern vampires.

When I first read The Vampire Lestat, all of these moments were equally foregrounded for me. Those parts of the story shaped my belief that- no matter what genre people put Anne Rice into -she is fundamentally a fantasy novelist. What is the tale of Akasha and Enkil but a fantasy plot point, framed by world history?

There is a certain kind of reader, though, that will never stop thinking of a digression from the narrative present as non-story material. A visual, episodic medium is an ideal way of making these digressions take up their own space. Lestat’s meta-narrative conversations with Nicolas and Gabrielle happened on a similar basis; it’s just less obvious because those three characters knew each other as both humans and vampires.

What is exemplified in those two earlier pages with Gabrielle (“During all this misery…” & “Hunters of the Savage Garden”) is Lestat’s mental narration contrasted with brief visual digressions. Both of them contain panel arrangements that suggest different events are being referenced. They look like they contain samples of a longer chunk of time but they’re just extremely stark perspectives within the same moment. The “Hunters of the Savage Garden” page shows Lestat and Gabrielle (post-vampire) talking as they leave Magnus’s castle for the night. They are briefly talking on two sides of a metal grate in alternating panels. The starkest contrast with the overall color scheme is the starscape behind Gabrielle when she says “I want to feed.” Nuances like that are tiny but- in a story that’s mostly framed by dialogue -they go a long way toward establishing a balance between the visual nature of comics and the whole ‘neverending interview’ structure.