MattBrady

by Chris Arrant

Fangoria’s January announcement that it had acquired the character Vampirella was apparently, premature to say the least. As Newsarama understands it, a deal for the acquisition was apparently in the works, and believed to be virtually complete, which led to the announcement being made at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention held in San Jose, CA in January. Since that time, Harris has insisted that there never was, or is any deal with Fangoria in regards to the selling/acquisition of the character, and declined to answer any questions about any kind of acquisition or sale, claiming that Fangoria's claim of such a deal was "not factual."

Vampirella’s “home” became quite clear with the recent launch of the new series, Vampirella Quarterly. Released by long-time publisher Harris, this new series seeks to return the dark-haired vampires to her roots, eschewing away from the "bad girl" genre and as its own flavor of horror.

The first issue was released this month, and features celebrated comics writer Joshua Hale Fialkov (Elks Run, Punks) with the first of a three part story. In additional to this new tale, a classic one is pulled from the vaults: Archie Goodwin and Jose Gonzalez' "And Be A Bride of Chaos"; long-time fans are nodding their heads, but it also serves as a classic tale that new readers can enjoy as well.

We spoke with Harris' Bon Alimagno who put together the book to find out the scoop.

Newsarama: Vampirella's been away for a bit, but this new quarterly series promises a regular dose of the character every four months. What led to the decision on this new title?

Bon Alimagno: You hit the nail on the head: we want to provide a regular dose of Vampi to all her patient fans. The direct market right now is a very inhospitable place for a comic book not published by Marvel or DC. The Big Two have done an excellent job the last 18 months or so building their respective market shares. Every slice or market share they gain, however, is a slice we lose. It's sort of the opposite of "A rising tide floats all boats". In that kind of environment, there was a lot of internal discussion about what kind of product we could put out that had the best chance for survival.

And the fact of the matter is that ongoing series experience regular rates of sales attrition. It's just unavoidable barring special circumstances or breakthroughs.

So you add that all up -- smaller marketplace to draw from, regular rates of attrition -- and it meant that eventually putting out a regular series would be a money losing proposition for us. We could go the route of mini-series or series of minis, but I didn't want the schedule to seem so erratic. I know fan loyalty is based on consistency and reliability. So I figured we'd do a quarterly series where right off the bat, fans know when to expect each issue. Meanwhile each issue can be relatively self-contained or at least easy to pick-up and follow, blunting the usual effects of sales attrition. It allows me to play around with the configurations of an issue, too, so it could be anything from a series of self-contained but connected stories or a diverse anthology one-shot and everything in between.

Oh... and it'd be every three months: April, July, October and January.

NRAMA: This new series promises two tales per issue, and in the first one we have a new one by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Stephen Segovia and a classic from Archie Goodwin and Jose Gonzalez. Will all the issues be this mixture?

BA: For at least the first two issues, yes. For the third issue, scheduled for Halloween release, I may have an expanded or even a double sized issue with all original material. I'd hope to have it contain the last part of the "Vengeance of Vampirella" arc and original self-contained short stories from a diverse array of talent.

NRAMA: Let's talk about Fialkov's story, "Vengeance of Vampirella". What is it about?

BA: Well, after the events of the Revelations miniseries, Vampi finds herself directionless. Her entire life has been exposed as a lie so she's rebuilding it from the ground up. We join her in progress as she's on a quest for vengeance against people with a particularly dark quality of evil in their hearts. But why? All I'll say is it involves her former arch nemesis the Blood Red Queen. The Queen used to serve Vampi's uber-nemesis, the mad god Chaos. She used to possess women, turn them into serial killers out to collect ten hearts. Supposedly if this quest was complete this would allow Chaos to finally come to earth and essentially end the world as we know it. This time around though we see Vampi doing the killing for her.
What's really going on here is going to surprise Vampi's long-time fans. And what happens at the end of the first issue will leave them speechless.

The title is a nod to the first ongoing Vampirella series. It's sort of our way of saying we're going back to basics, while establishing the new place Vampi finds herself.

NRAMA: How many parts is the story?

BA: Three, though I hope each one can be considered relatively self-contained.

NRAMA: Writing this is Joshua Hale Fialkov, best known for his work on Elk's Run and Western Tales of Terror. Why'd you seek him out to help you bring Vampirella back?

BA: I'm always on the lookout for fresh voices and talent. I'd been in some contact with Joshua after Vampirella Comics Magazine reviewed his Western Tales series. It was very interesting to see someone act as a writer and editor on a horror anthology -- it demonstrated that he knew how horror -- good horror -- should work.

Out of curiosity I'd gotten issues of Elk's Run at my local comic shop and just enjoyed the hell out of them. It was a very different kind of comic than what was normally being put out there -- something very real and extra-ordinary at the same time. In the meantime he'd sent me some pitches and I was impressed with his ideas and take on Vampi. He has the kind of approach I'm always looking to bring to the character so when I was looking to start a new series I immediately thought of him.

NRAMA: Coming from the archives for the second story is "And Be A Bride of Chaos". Why'd you choose this story to start off with?

BA: I think it's the best of Archie Goodwin's and Jose Gonzales's initial Vampirella stories. Long-time fans may disagree. But it's a perfect marriage of Goodwin's eloquence and mastery of genre fictions and Gonzales's fluid, dynamic linework. I always tell my writers to think of Vampirella standing "on the crossroads of sex and death" and this story is the epitome of that. I wrote an introductory essay that calls it a "classic milestone". And that's exactly what it is -- it set the bar for what fans would come to expect from Vampirella comics in the years to come.

It's been masterfully recolored by Mike Kelleher of Glass House Graphics. There's a lot of people out there who aren't familiar with some of the classic black and white Vampirella stories from the seventies and I considered this a great opportunity to introduce them to these classics.

NRAMA: What do you have planned for future issues of Vampirella Quarterly?

BA: I'd like to eventually ramp up the page count and start including more than one original story, maybe utilizing indy talent to bring unique art styles and storytellng perspectives to Vampirella. But there will always be an all-new lead story told with "superhero" art styles to keep our traditional fans happy. Those stories I want to use to bring back some of Vampi's classic allies, villains and settings and update them for our modern audience. Hopefully over time this'll build Vampi her own universe to play in, one that the fans become familiar with and are eager to explore.

NRAMA: It is well known that the comic output at Harris
Publishing has decreased from it's heyday in the mid-90s. Can you speak to the scaling down of comics at Harris, and what the future holds for comic publishing at Harris?

BA: Well... I think what happened to us happened across the entire market. With the bubble bursting in the mid-nineties every company's sales shrunk by a factor of six to ten. The problem is going from one million sales to 100,000 is still more comfortable for Marvel and DC than our going from 125,000 to 20,000 or whatever it was earlier this decade. Despite all that, our costs continued to rise with competitive page rates and higher quality printing. So something had to give.

Something else happened to us that made the bubble bursting even harsher for our company. Vampirella got caught up in the "Bad Girl craze" that accompanied the boom. Now I'm a young guy and I was just a kid when the "craze" happened. I remember reading Wizard and thinking all a comic needed to be popular was to feature a woman with large breasts on its covers.

That perception of popularity led to a perception of collectibility and next thing you know there's a ridiculous number of people buying Vampirella for no other reason than "half-naked woman on the cover" in their minds equals "collectible". And as a kid I bought into that, too, because why would you bother having a quality story and art in something like this.

When the bubble burst, the speculators went away. While we still had our hardcore fans, they weren't enough of them to print as many comics as we did when the speculators were still around. Now for several years we struggled with that, trying to figure out how to still put out a monthly comic book series with increasingly higher costs and lower sales.

And we just realized we couldn't do it anymore. We did the Vampirella Magazine for a while, and frankly I think we may have dropped the ball preparing fans for what they were going to get. I still believe we published a very good general interest magazine that covered the crossroads of comics and pop culture. A lot of fans though expected something similar to what they first read in the early 70's, an anthology mag of horror comics, and this was going to be anything but that.

So we lost some fans over that. I had one come up to me at NY Comic-Con 2006 and say to my face, "What you did was an insult to the fans." That was not the intention, that is never the intention. We were trying to keep the company healthy, creating a product that we could sell on national newsstands and also draw in much more advertising revenue than we normally would. The fans didn't see it that way and dropped the book in large numbers and we've learned from that.

From my perspective it often does feel like I'm pushing a boulder up a hill, that there's a lot of momentum within the market going against us and it's just tough to navigate through it and find openings. Like when we put out Vampirella Revelations #1, our attempt to give fans traditional Vampirella comic books again.

We ended up scheduling it the month that House of M #7, Infinite Crisis #1 and All-Star Superman #1 was coming out. If you're a retailer and had a set budget what would you rather risk your money on? So the book was under-ordered and couldn't build momentum.

We were still being lumped in with the "bad girls" craze, except now it was a scarlet letter that made our books distasteful for the casual fan to pick-up.

I tried to break that by bringing in writers like Mike Carey and Phil Hester and now Joshua Fialkov... but we still have a long way to go before the industry as a whole sees Vampirella not just as a "bad girl" but as any other character.

That's what I hope to do in the future, challenge that perception with some really well told stories that explore the crossroads of sex and death. I have no delusions we're doing Shakespeare here, but I hope to give our hardcore fans the stories they've been begging for and new ones stories that they couldn't get from any other character. These will come in the Quarterly, but may also come in other forms as well, maybe even on the web or in original graphic novels -- we haven't decided. But all options are on the table.

aric_dacia

There have been some great Vampirella stories over the years but it's hard to take the publisher seriously when they say they want to move past the bad girl craze stuff and then the promo art features panels of thong-wearing bottoms on every page.

I'm not saying they *should* try to be anything other than what they are, mind you. Good stories are good stories and Vampi is a fun character -- but c'mon, the half-naked girl in the stories is one of the main selling points: always was, always will be.

KoozyK

that first image of the girl with the heart-shaped thong is ridiculous. now THAT'S quality comics!

Hypestyle

does this include the stories written by Christopher Priest?

Colonsus

Wow. Just wow. Seems to be an awful lot of talk in the article about the "story" when we all know that story has little or nothing to do with this comic.

CATT

WOW! This has got to be a BIG black eye for FANGORIA COMICS! The fact that they have been hyping that they own Vampirella everywhere and will now have to admit they were sooooo wrong. I guess the editor (Scott Licina) up at FANGORIEA COMICS got a little to excited before the deal was done. I've got to wonder about a new company that tries to get big headlines like this before they have all of their facts straight.
Well, I personally am glad to hear that Vampirella will be staying at HARRIS. I think they are on the right track with her and I hope they sell a lot of books. Now that the TRUTH is finally out I will be picking this book up with confidence that it will have a full story line. I now have a few concerns about FANGORIA COMICS and what we can believe with them.
Thanks for getting the TRUTH out to all the fans Bon and Newsarama. This book looks great!!!!

Dark Light

I want an ongoing monthly.

ziza9

Maybe she's supposed to be a prostitute....or succubus pretending to be a prostitute. With Vampirella, I never judge clothing. If she is a prostitute, then she's dressed rather appropriately. I mean, it looks like a whack and jack theater they are going into.

ArcLight

I love Vampirella but I got tired of trying to figure out what the heck Harris was doing with the comics. I was really hoping someone else would take over.

Oh well....

Scavenger

Be nice if the rest of the Revelations stuff got published, the Priest or the Rozum stuff....

Of course Revelations might have worked if they had an artist who didn't draw Vampirella with pointy nipples in every pannel or a thong made of dental floss.

Ravengregory

So you have some issue with Fangoria? You could have just said that instead of dancing around the issue with capital letters.

Book looks cool. Wasn't planning to check it out but now I think I will. Plus Josh is a decent writer capable of spinning a great yarn when his heart is in it.

CATT

Actually, No. I just use all capitals when I use a companies name. Sorry if it came off that way. I read FANGORIA MAGAZINE and love it.

Charlie Hustle

while it's not really my style of comics i don't think the t&a is a big deal.

jasonm

Eh, I wouldn't worry. I'm sure it was just miscommunication and nothing malicious.

tomburgos

The thing with Vampi is that looking like that and wearing that, there's absolutely no need for close-ups of her butt or pane;s showing her legs akimbo...she is a walking ad for T&A comics.
HOWEVER, I love the character and I ADORED when Mark MIllar and Mike Mayhew did her monthly a few years back.\A perfect team...she was the most kickass vampire-related anti-hero/hero since Buffy and the stories were full of action, pathos and character moments.
In fact, during their run, I totally forgot that I was reading a book about a thong clad vampiress with duct tape holding her boobs from falling out.
It was that good.

I also like the basic concept of the Blood Red Queen...I just wish she was used better...

Arvandor

It's good to finally have confusion about Vampi's ownership finally cleared up.

However, I'm not sure I have any confidence in Harris any more. If publishers like Avatar and Broadsword can keep going, then Harris should be able to keep Vampi - who is far more well known - in fairly constant publication.

boomboom

that would have been "Revelations: Book Two" but unfortunately that is in the past...maybe someday??!!

Dilutral

At Long Last Vampirella News!!!

Love that character and all she represents!!! Can't wait to get my hands on this new series!
thanks for the preview!!!

I hope more people pick this up!!! Every one that doesn't is missing out!!!