I, Vampire #13

She kills things with cold blood! Like lizards and vampires and ex-spouses.

This cover is just crying out for a sitcom theme song.

She's Deborah Dancer!
Vampire Hunter
And part-time community college pothead genius as well!

Deborah Dancer!
Sold one of her kidneys!
And now she battles evil demon vampires from hell!

Deborah Dancer!
She may have Tourette's!
Or she may just have serious trucker mouth, who can tell?

Deborah Dancer!
Itinerant cutter!
She's a Californian Hipster New England Southern Belle!

Last regular issue, all of the vampires in the world were cured of their vampirism. The cost for this miraculous miracle? Andrew Bennett is now an all-powerful evil Vampire King! But at least Tig and Mary are okay!

Oops! I mean, at least Mary is okay! I forgot Andrew's first act was to eat Tig.

Since the Battle of Utah, Stormwatch has gone off to their own comic book because their cross-over tie-in sales booster appearance was over. Sure, a megalomaniac all-powerful vampire was still on the loose but what are they supposed to do about it? They have their own Goddamned problems to deal with! They shouldn't have even been in I, Vampire! Let the Professor and Mary Ann Seward deal with the problem. So Jack, Midnighter, and Apollo have left Mary Seward and John Troughton on their own in Boston.

Mary spends the majority of the comic narrating her little drama. She still thinks like a vampire. She can't quite grasp the reality of being human again. Until she's mugged. And then instinct takes over and she realizes her power never came simply from the blood.

I think being a vampire for 500 years helped a little bit.

Now that Mary's confidence has been restored, she's ready to hunt down Andrew herself. Not to kill him but maybe to kill to Tig, at the very least, for fucking her man. Not that anything has been mentioned about Vampire Tig and Vampire Andrew's relationship. I'm simply assuming that when a vampire of one sexual orientation converts a vampire they're sexually attracted to, they immediately fuck.

Mary is putting together a plan to find Andrew. First, hunt down Andrew's sire. Since Andrew's sire, Cain, was recently killed, that should be difficult. Although the search could lead them to the Unknown Soldier since he's the embodiment of Cain. Unless he's the embodiment of Abel and he's trying to gain justice for innocent people killed in conflict. But that doesn't make as much sense since Cain is the one withe the mark and the curse that he shall never be killed.

Part two of Mary's plan is finding an ex-lover of Andrew's that I know nothing about but I'm going to make a major leap here and guess it is Deborah Dancer. She's probably from Preboot history and all of the Andrew Bennett-philes wet themselves when they saw her on the cover.

Deborah Dancer's home: The Deep Back Woods of Maine. Three or four trees constitute "woods" in Maine.

Andrew and Tig pay Deborah a visit and Andrew throws out a little history to get Tig (and the new readers like me!) up to speed.

I dig Tig's vampy look.

I just pulled out the 90s Who's Who and reread the I...Vampire entry (see how the reboot version differs by replacing the ellipsis with a comma!). In the old universe, Deborah Dancer was a vampire hunter's assistant. She managed to kill Mary, Queen of Blood, although Deborah's mentor, Mishkin, was killed. Andrew also ended up dying although since he can never really seem to die, he resurrected later when some writer wanted to write a new miniseries about him.

John and Mary break in and stop Andrew before he can convert Deborah. Next issue, Deborah Dancer will save the day and then walk off into the sunset with sad music playing until she reaches the next town that needs her help.

She's Deborah Dancer!

I, Vampire #13 Rating: +1 Ranking. The art is still gorgeous plus they've tweaked the colors a little bit. It's still mostly a black, white, and red comic book but other colors are making slight appearances and it's exactly what the look of this comic needed. Unless I'm wrong and I've simply come to terms with the look and I'm making excuses as to why I thought the book looked so much better than usual! I think I like this comic book better when Andrew and Tig are evil and Mary is good.