REQUIEM: VAMPIRE KNIGHT graphic novel (Collects RESURECTION and DANSE MACABRE stories)
Writer: Pat Mills
Art: Olivier Ledroit
Published by Panini Books
Review by Stewart Loud
From the godfather of British comics Pat Mills, comes this frighteningly original and deliriously dark story about German officer Heinrich's horrific journey into a demonic afterlife filled with vampires, zombies, dark gods and mutants. Like something out of the sort of nightmares I get when I forget to take my medication, this comic blew my fucking mind with just how messed up it is!
Welcome to an Earth where time goes backwards, the oceans and land masses have swapped places and cruel vampires fight a constant bloody battle to enforce decadence and prevent change or progress. From the very beginning this book draws you into it's debauched, frightening, often sickening and sometimes confusing world with it's lavish painted artwork and mind bending extra dimensional concepts.
The book begins with Heinrich's death on the Eastern Front in 1944 and sees him reawaken as a vampire in a hell dimension far stranger than any setting I've witnessed in any other piece of printed literature or film. He quickly meets Otto Von Todt, a veteran vampire knight who introduces him to the dreadful dimension that he must now call his home, and sets about initiating him into the order of knights tasked with enforcing the will of the ruling elite.
Filled with truly disturbing characters, set in a monumentally wicked society filled with murder, corruption, slavery, enormous battles between the vampire knights and all manner of demonic creatures and thanks in no small part to Ledroit's incredibly striking and unsettling visual style, this is one of the most atmospheric comics I've ever read.
I've seen and read plenty of other vampire stories where being a vampire looks quite cool. Well not in this one it bloody doesn't! Forced to drink the blood of disgusting creatures to survive and constantly at the mercy of depraved and sadistic beings, Heinrich despairs at his situation as he attempts to adapt and come to terms with the situation he now finds himself in.
As the creator of long running British comic 2000ad, Pat Mills has been writing comics for a very long time and his experience and expertise shines like a super nova in this, the best thing I've read so far this year.
GO OUT AND BUY IT!
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