Suvudu Universe

I thought I’d try the new Dynamite series Legenderry: A Steampunk Adventure, the seven-issue pulp character revamp written by Bill Willingham and drawn by Sergio Davila.

In the opening sequence, Vampirella is dining with Brett Reid (the Green Hornet) at her Scarlet Club (later referred to as Club Scarlet). They’re debating the proper way to make a martini when a gang of bad guys attack. Here’s our first full-length (half-page) view of “Madam Pendragon”. Notice the club looks a bit like a fancy dining room, definitely indoors.

And here are the bad guys, who appear to have wandered in from an S&M party:

After a grammar lesson, she rushes to battle, stripping off her clothes, as shown in the last panel on this page. Note particularly the bare arm.

However, during the splash, she’s dressed again, including decorative arm warmers. And apparently, they’ve all been magically transported to some kind of battlefield, where the room’s walls have disappeared. All sense of place has been cheated, with dust clouds making it unnecessary to actually draw backgrounds.

She kills them all, of course, and the rest of the issue involves questioning the girl who led the bad guys to the club. Continuing the trend of the art not working particularly well with the text, at the same time she’s claiming not to be a “street wanton”, she’s flashing cleavage and thigh that’s daring for these days, not to mention centuries ago. This is our bashful young lady:

The plot, such as it is so far, reminds me of every noir detective tale, where they have to help the lovely lady find her missing sister. In this promotional interview, Willingham acknowledges the pacing will be leisurely at first:

It’s slow beginning, obviously, so we’ll pick up some speed. In the early pages of a story like this, every single new page is also a design page. It takes a while to get momentum into the deeper end of the story.

However, he also praises the artist for “visually tell[ing] the story with clarity”.

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