The other miniseries finishing this week is Frank Tieri and Clayton Henry's highly unlikely X-Men: Apocalypse vs Dracula four-parter. 

Surprisingly, there actually turns out to be some minor continuity purpose to this storyline.  It establishes why Apocalypse's blood has the healing properties that are key to the current X-Men storyline.  The X-books haven't been making much effort to dovetail with one another for quite a while, and it's a pleasant surprise to see the effort being made.  God knows nobody wants to return to the forced crossovers of the 1990s, but it's nice to see some logical interaction between the titles where it actually makes sense.

Now, on paper, Frank Tieri's Apocalypse vs Dracula sounds like a very questionable idea.  But while it doesn't quite work, it's actually better than I was expecting.  I was braced for something disastrously misconceived, with a horrendous style clash.  In fact, the book doesn't fall into that trap.  It keeps the two title characters apart for the first three issues and tries to build up Apocalypse as a quasi-mystical figure so that they more or less fit in the final issue.  Inserting Apocalypse retroactively into Dracula's origin story (as the leader of the army that got him killed) is a bit clunky, but not disastrous.  In fact, we end up with a series where Dracula is the scheming villain and Apocalypse is a bit of a bludgeoning thug with ideas above his station.

It all works better than you might think.  The problems are more to do with the execution than the basic idea.  This is essentially a vampire/conspiracy story, and calls for darker, more atmospheric art.  Instead, it gets Clayton Henry.  Henry is a perfectly good artist when it comes to straightforward superheroes, but he's not exactly big on mood.  The plot also seems a bit shaky, with the initial story of internal politics in Clan Akkaba brushed aside to make way for a big fight between Apocalypse and Dracula, as the gimmick of the series overpowers the initial set-up.

Still, by all rights this should have been a catastrophe, and it really wasn't.  It's not a particularly great series, but I do have to give credit for taking a horrible premise and wringing a perfectly readable little story out of it.

Rating: B-

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