Every so often, Marvel solicit something so bizarre that my initial reaction isn't even "Wow, that sounds awful" so much as "But... why?"  X-Men: Fairy Tales #1, which promises the unlikely spectacle of a Japanese fairy tale rewritten to include optic beams, is a particularly good example.  Why would you want to do such a thing?  I just don't get it.

A less extreme example is X-Men: Apocalypse vs Dracula, a story which doesn't exactly sound like it was crying out to be told.  The whole idea screams "mismatch."  Dracula, at his best, is a character who works on mood and implication.  Apocalypse, in contrast, is a bombastic supervillain with all the subtlety of a brick to the groin.  Both are good villains in their way, although let's be honest, there's a gaping chasm of quality between a recurring X-Men villain and one of the most iconic characters of popular fiction over the last 150 years. 

But it's hard to see what you get from putting them together.  If anything, you would expect them to pull irreconcilably in opposite directions, undermining one another's strengths.  I cannot begin to imagine how a scene with both of these characters is going to work.

In fact, this first issue isn't bad at all.  It's a set-up issue where Tieri provides the characters with a passable rationale to cross paths.  Back in the fifteenth century, Dracula encounters Apocalypse's army and gets himself killed.  In the Victorian era, he shows up in London killing off Apocalypse's followers.  After getting rid of their undesirably bombastic leader, the sect turn to Apocalypse himself for help.

So we've got a decent motivation.  But the issue never has to deal with the basic problem of how they work on panel together, save in the opening flashback where Dracula isn't a vampire yet.  For the Victorian scenes, Dracula's behind the scenes killing people off, and Apocalypse is still asleep.  It remains to be seen how Tieri will try and make these characters complement one another.

Art comes from Clayton Henry, whom we've seen before on Exiles.  He's a good clear superhero artist who was a good match for that book, but I'm not sure he's the right man for this material.  It's commendably readable work, but it's rather lacking in atmosphere.  Even by Comics Code standards, his murder victims are awfully polite - neatly dressed corpses with slight trickles of blood.  And this book is rated Teen+, so it's not like he didn't have the leeway to go a little further.  The art tells the story perfectly adequately but never draws me into the world.

I was braced for this to be an outright disaster, and it's not.  It's a perfectly alright story, so far as it goes.  But then, it hasn't yet had to deal with the major problem: getting these two characters to work together.  And I'm not convinced that the creators are going to carry it off.  So, even though this issue was better than I'd been expecting, I can't help but remain sceptical about the future course of the series.

(Incidentally, I see from the cover that Marvel is claiming a trademark on Dracula.  You've got to be kidding me, right?)

Rating: B

back | continue