ZENESCOPE DOUBLE-BILL – Two Big, Strong Event Issues If You Have 90’s-style Nostalgia

New out from Zenescope are the Van Helsing Annual: Bride Of The Night, and Fairy Tale Team-Up Robyn Hood & Belle The Beast Hunter. And they can serviceably entertain new and existing audiences.

The Van Helsing Annual continues the story of Liesel Van Helsing. Having discovered the vampires are working to rid themselves of their fatal reaction to sunlight, she has teamed up with none other than Dracula’s Daughter to prevent the cataclysmic expansion of their power.

In Fairy Tale Team-Up, Robyn Locksley and Belle DiMarco cross paths in different angles when a secret military facility starts stockpiling monsters from around the world to conduct research to turn them into weapons of war. Confronted by old and new enemies from both their pasts, they need to work together if they are going to survive.

As with most Zenescope productions, the covers oversell both in titillation and art quality. The interior scene and designs are nowhere near as provocative or gratuitous as the various covers would imply. However, even if they were that would be disappointingly unimpressive due to the often-lacklustre quality of the interior art. The details between panels fluctuate wildly, where one will be nicely detailed and clear, and the next will look lazy and incomplete. In both stories, they rely heavily on action and gore to sell various character’s power and the stakes of the story, and it is all undercut by these various artists’ inconsistency in expressing it.

Both comics appear to be stuck in the mid-late-90’s era of Image-style superhero comics. The dialog and plots are cheesy almost to the point of comedy.  Every scene has dialog to distract from the cliched action and occasional poor framing. However, the continuous exposition ensures that no new reader is left behind for not having read anything from their respective series.

Although these criticisms may seem significant, I couldn’t say I hate the sum total of either of these. All and all they capture what made the 90’s comics fun. Bombastic action, cheesy one-liners, and overly dramatic monologues make this comic style just plain fun to read. They aren’t gritty or grim, and any tragic moment feels more like a soap opera climax rather than having the gut punch you get from more modern styles. In short, they are fun because they were never designed to be deep or serious. They are the colorful and shiny image produced by the two veneers of public domain fiction, and bombastic superhero tropes layered over each other. They aren’t particularly deep, but that can be a nice respite from the heavier stuff they share the shelves with.

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