Requiem Vampire Knight Omnibus Vol. 1

Pat Mills! A name to be followed by either an exclamation mark (“What comics you’ve made Pat Mills!”) or an interrobang  (“What comics you’ve made Pat Mills?!”). Whether he writes self-created works, corporate gigs, action comics, romance comics, horror comics, science fiction comics, fantasy comics, war comics, British comics, American comics, short comics, long-form comics … there’s something identifiable about the work of Pat Mills. A sort of buzzing, crackling, energy, the kind that can be compared to Jack Kirby, but much much angrier. The best of Pat Mills comics are full of rage — rage at senseless use of human life (Charley’s War), at capitalistic abuse (Ro-Busters), at colonialist exploitation (World War Three). The worst of Pat Mills comics are also filled with rage. It’s a recurring feature. It can give the job focus (the early parts of ABC Warriors) or rob it of focus (the latter parts of ABC Warriors).

The good and bad sides of Pat Mills as a writer are clear to see in Requiem Vampire Knight, his long-term collaboration with artist Olivier Ledroit. Originally published in France¹ in the Franco-Belgian album format, it since been translated into several languages, including Mills’ native English. These early editions had been quite hard to find, but now Panini is redoing the whole series in an omnibus format, with each collection reprinting five stories for a hefty 250-page behemoth. A good value for money, if nothing else, though the reproduction leaves much to be desired. The fatter volume and soft cover make several scenes disappear into the middle of the many large spreads. Lettering (and bubble placement) is particularly bad throughout (just check out the choices for the cover). At best its dull tones clash with the rest of the work, at worst it makes it too hard to understand who is speaking which line.

The story is … a somewhat confused mess, but an engaging confused mess! The reason I compared Mills to Kirby is mostly due to the overabundance of ideas. Each story is crammed with enough concepts to power a dozen other series that are just mentioned as side pieces to main event. Requiem Vampire Knight opens with Heinrich, a German soldier during World War II, who dies on the Eastern front. He finds himself reawakened on a world called Resurrection which operates as a cracked mirror of Earth (or any number evil-universe episodes you can find in many a superhero comic or science fiction TV show). The land masses have been replaced with oceans, waters are burning fires, chronology operates backwards (all living things are regressing into infancy and nothingness), and “time is out of joint” (with beings from various historical periods finding themselves stuck together).

Also, a bit like Dante’s Inferno, what type of person you were in life influences the type of being you become on Resurrection. Specifically, the worse you were the stronger you become. As an efficient Nazi soldier Heinrich finds himself one of the vampire elite, possessing great physical and mystical power. A soldier in the court of Dracula, the first and strongest vampire, the newly christened (they should probably have another term for it, what with all the inverted crosses around) Requiem must find himself in this new and strange world while fighting enemies from without (different faction wrestling for control on Resurrection) and within (unsparingly the intentionally immoral vampires are big on backstabbing).

The best parts of Vampire Requiem Knight are the comedic ones. The already exaggerated and histrionic tones of Pat Mills’ scripts are taken even further when he works in a censorship-free mode. This might not be an adult work in terms of sophistication, but it is definitely "for adults" in terms of content (boobs, violence). More than once I found myself thinking of John Stanley’s Melvin Monster, with its endless bad-is-good good-is-bad joke. A decadent court under the heel of Dracula is a yawn, a decadent court in which one the evil leaders is a little satanic baby fighting to avoid becoming a fetus is genuinely amusing. Requiem is a Nazi, but he is still a man of (personal) honor, whose behavior is guided by what he believes to be proper. Everyone else around him is busy standing atop the corpses of their rivals and can’t quite believe their new comrade’s naïveté. All of this is contemplated by Ledroit’s art, which goes to elven before cranking up the dial all the way to the end.

Every single page is a tablature of horror, action, spiked armor, big guns, bigger swords, dynamic poses, and monstrous figures. Back in the day I reviewed the first few issues of Marvel’s Warhammer 40K comics and complained that it felt quite sedated for what it tried to be (a death metal opera in comics form), with people often acting in naturalistic manner and action scenes that followed the conventions of action and counter-action. Requiem Vampire Knight is probably closer to the ideal Warhammer 40K comic than any comics actually published about Warhammer 40K² Every page tries to be a standout piece in which everything happens, there is no downtime, no rest on Resurrection, “there is only war.”

As a result, many of the more dramatic bits, like the attempts give moral weight to Requiem's genuine love for (gasp! Shock!) a Jewish woman, fall flat on its face. Any attempt at pathos in such an over-the-top world is bound to fail. Ledroit can’t give weight to the characters’ human emotions, they are just another part of the vast scenery. When a misandrist space pirate from Venus (that’s a minor character mind), boasts about castrating the entire male population of her planet in a past life am I meant to take it as feminism run amok or simply part of the lore that everyone who arrives to this world is evil in some way? What to make of the fact that (some) victims of the Nazis reincarnate in Resurrection as well? That Christian ideologues are portrayed as crazy reactionaries while inhabiting a world in which satanic conspiracies are real? I can’t. I don’t think the creators can as well.

Mills’ is not a subtle writer, you probably couldn’t be if you wanted to hammer massages at children three pages at the time while making it past corporate censorship, but Vampire Requiem Knight is shouting its massage at me so loud it becomes completely garbled. Turns out when everything goes to 11 you can’t quite catch the melody. It doesn’t sabotage the work completely, there are pleasures to be found in the sheer abundance (not abundance of one particular thing, an abundance of everything) of Requiem Vampire Knight. It’s an example of Mills unleashed, completely free of the shackles of editors he hates so much, but it's also a good demonstration why a good editor is sometimes necessary.

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