Blood Hunt #1: Pleased To Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name…

It’s finally happening! After 6 long years of building the Vampire nation, and elevating Blade to a level he’d never really been before. Marvel’s big Avengers event for the summer has begun, and it looks like it’s going to be a bloody one (groan). Do the Avengers, Doctor Strange, Clea, Moon Knight, the rest of the Night Travelers, and the Marvel Universe have what it takes to take these blood suckers down? You’ll have to read to find out, so let’s get this show on the road…

Jed MacKay, Jason Aaron, and a whole bevy of other writers have built the Vampire characters in their catalog, while making so many more. Starting out with Jason Aaron’s Avengers run, Marvel has made a concerted effort on developing and expanding their Vampire characters in a campaign we’ve never seen before. From Aaron’s Avengers run, which included having Blade join Earth’s Mightiest, to his part in the Darkhold event, to vampires taking a role in Percy’s Wolverine run, to Jed MacKay’s creation of the Midnight Mission in his Moon Knight run, the amount of blood suckers we’ve seen outside of a horror movie/comic, and it’s been quite successful in garnering up excitement for this event once it was announced.

Sure, in the beginning there were detractors. Vampires, outside of Blade, Dracula, and a few of the outliers, most Marvel fans couldn’t tell you who’s a vampire, and who isn’t, but Marvel’s track record for Magic and the supernatural aren’t quite as mainstream as their regular superhero counterparts are, but it’s still a very lush, and heady world for new and experienced fans to jump into. Sure, characters like Doctor Strange or Ghost Rider can be dense characters to jump into, with a whole world full of dark overtones, and questions that you can’t solve by throwing a shield at, but once you put your toe in, you’ll just want more. This is what MacKay and company have been giving us these last few years, and it’s given us such a beautiful menagerie of stories to sink our teeth into.

Joining MacKay on art duties is superstar artist Pepe Larraz and colorist Marte Gracia, and boy, do they deliver. Larraz has become one of, if not the best artist Marvel currently employs in their stable of interstellar talent, and he just keeps getting better with each new project. The Avengers are grand, and bigger than life. Exuding that feeling you should get when we see Earth’s Mightiest arrive on the scene, while simultaneously portraying the vampires as being menacing and terrifying. His style, mixed with Gracia’s colors evoke a dark and moody environment that we see these heroes and villains cast in. Especially when it comes to the last few pages. So much attention to detail, while giving each character their own agency in the battle with the Bloodcoven. This has become something we’ve come to expect from Larraz. First getting a taste of just how spectacular he is in the Avengers: No Surrender epic, to the House of X comic, which he followed up in the X of Swords event. The man can do no wrong when it comes to these big, sweeping stories that’s geared up to make a big splash on the Marvel Universe landscape.