Poster and cover art for the series showcasing the sumptuous art by Olivier Ledroit as well as everyone’s favorite character from the comic, Claudia, so much so that she got her own spinoff series (fair use)

(6) PAT MILLS –

REQUIEM VAMPIRE KNIGHT (2000 – present?)

The Franco-British comic Requiem Vampire Knight – or French title Requiem Chevalier Vampire – by British writer Pat Mills and French artist Olivier Ledroit is exactly what is says on the tin – the protagonist Requiem is, ah, a vampire knight (or chevalier).

The intriguing part is that it is posthumous fantasy of the darkest kind – I am a fan of posthumous fantasy or fantasy set in the afterlife, and that’s before you throw in Mills’ characteristic blackly comic misanthropy. Life sucks and the afterlife sucks more. Literally. The protagonist, a German soldier from the Second World War, is killed on the Eastern Front only to find himself in the posthumous fantasy setting known as Resurrection – a literally hellish inversion of Earth in which land and sea are reversed (with seas of perpetual fire in the place of the terrestrial continents) and whose resurrected inhabitants age in reverse, growing younger into infancy (and beyond into non-existence) with fading memories. Worst of all, the more evil one was in life, the better they are rewarded in Resurrection as various classes of monster, with the vampires as the elite aristocracy (populated by such characters as the historical Dracula, Nero, Caligula and Attila the Hun) and former innocent victims as the lowly lemures, “outcasts at best and food or entertainment at worst”. The protagonist finds himself resurrected as the titular vampire knight – but still plagued by a conscience, particularly towards the love of his former life, the Jewish Rebecca, now a lemure (a term borrowed from Roman mythology) bent on her ticket out of Resurrection (‘expiring’ her former tormentor).

In the words of TV Tropes, “an age-old adage was that, if you were bad in life, when you died it generally got worse. Nowhere is this idea more assaulted, mugged, curb-stomped and left for dead face-down in a rancid gutter than in the world of Résurrection, the brainchild of Pat Mills and illustrated in excruciatingly loving and gory detail by Olivier Ledroit”.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)