Faiza Hussein, a British Muslim who ends up wielding Excalibur. I wasn’t necessarily a great fan of the major characters, most of whom had appeared in Excalibur, an X-Men spinoff and before that in other titles, but I did like the work of the author of this series, Paul Cornell, and this series didn’t disappoint.Īs I re-read it now, I’m just so impressed with the plotting work and the elegance of the way Cornell kept diving into the vast sea/dumpster of Marvel’s existing continuity to fetch up clever new uses of old characters like Killpower (who was as ridiculous as he sounds in his earlier appearances) and existing storylines as well as his invention of new UK-centered characters like “Captain Midlands” and Dr. It was published from 2008-2009, running only 15 issues. I feel almost as if I’ve seen every move on the imaginative chessboard when it comes to vampires, though the thing about popular culture is that there’s always one more move to make.Ĭase in point might be this short story arc from an already-obscure and short-lived Marvel Comics series, Captain Britain and MI13. If you’re taking the side of the vampire on some level-portraying vampires as having culture, as having human-like motivations, as equal to or threatened by non-vampiric humanity, the answer of why the entire world isn’t a vampire world is “because there’s lots of ways to kill a vampire and a lot of vampire killers”. That’s the vampire as monstrous force of nature, glimpsed only from a distance, where its resemblance to humanity is only superficial. The answer can be, “vampires are rare because they’re governed by mysterious and inconsistent motivations-they don’t kill everybody because for some uncanny reason they don’t or can’t, because they’re not like us”. The answer can be, “because they follow some kind of rules designed to manage human beings as cattle”-at which point you just combined vampires and conspiracy theory. If it’s the former, then you’re generally taking the perspective of those who are fighting or threatened by vampires and you have to decide: how come vampires haven’t just wiped us all out, if they’re that powerful. If you’re using vampires as the central storytelling platform, you have to decide whether they’re incredibly powerful and uncanny threats to humanity and thus to amplify the horrific, inhuman nature of the vampire, or whether they’re threatened, hunted, and somewhat sympathetically human in their thinking. Once you really explore a concept like “the vampire” that widely, it starts to groan under its own weight a bit. Funny vampires, serious vampires, campy vampires. werewolves, vampires as a persecuted subculture. For a while, that radial diffusion of vampires was interesting-sexy vampires, melancholic vampires, vampires who were a metaphor for disease, vampires vs. In terms of cultural history, the most interesting thing about vampires is that they kind of exploded in pop cultural terms after staying in a fairly specific horror niche for a long time. To be honest, I’m at a point of finding vampires sort of boring.
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