GFT Retrospective #69: Halloween Edition 2010

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. Just A Ticketmaster In A Cage

The world is a vampire, Ticketholders!

And I'm not just saying that because I'm reviewing a Halloween comic book about vampires and it made me think of "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" by The Smashing Pumpkins. By the way, what is up with song titles that are nowhere in the lyrics? I'd do a New Piece Offerings (NPO) on the subject, but that's all I have to say without it becoming fodder for one of those AI-generated Seinfeld episodes.

No; what I really made the reference for was the fact that people younger than myself keep deciding to be punk-ass bitches about holding a steady job because they think they can just be influencers by looking a certain way and existing. Or if they're old enough to drink, they think they can come to work drunk, have a panic attack when their spirit of choice kills the brain cells that know how to cook a chicken and they can't find a cleaning rag, and they end up crying and vomiting into a trashcan until the manager sends them home and I have to pretend to be a happy corporate tool while I pick up their slack to the tune of two back-to-back ten hour days that almost turned into four of them. Yes, I realize that there are people out there who do harder work for longer hours and more days in a row, but I'm an emotionally immature forty-year-old white-ish virgin whose body is mostly made up of fried chicken, Cheetos, and Pop Tarts with a body fluid composition of Starbucks, Red Bull, and Five Hour Energy, and it takes a special kind of individual to give a fuck when the world is set to drain.

You thought I was going to rhyme "fuck" with "suck," didn't you?

What do you think I am; a poet?

I mean, I have written poetry. I even got published when I was in elementary school (a fact that I have no physical proof of anymore, but I'm still proud of it and still looking for my copy of that book in my parents' garage). But that's beside the point, and I'd be perfectly happy if you please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment something scary at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't get turned at a Halloween party, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my vampire-slaying content.

Also, issue 69 of the GFT Retrospective, and it's about people who suck. Nice!

GFT Halloween Edition #2 (2010)

I remember really wanting this issue to lead to something, considering that Zenescope took the time to put in an editor's note that the story takes place before Hard Choices. Like we needed to be told that the story with Sela on Earth takes place before she got trapped in Myst, right?

Said story begins with an unnamed blonde woman narrating about how watching someone die in front of you "changes you...in more ways than one." Vampire foreshadowing!

Welcome to Bloodfest 2010, a vampire cosplay convention that appears to be taking place in an old plantation house or town hall building in the middle of the woods somewhere. Come dressed as your favorite Dracula, Lost Boy, Cullen, legally distinct Elvira facsimile, or...Hermione Granger by way of Britney Spears' "....Baby, One More Time" schoolgirl outfit? Oh, and stay for the murder...because it's not like dead people can go anywhere!

Of course, the blonde and her three friends show up, and unbeknownst to her, they are real vampires taking the "I'm gonna take my native language as a foreign language elective for an easy A so I can play football" approach to feeding because shooting fish in a barrel is easier when you're a fish with an Uzi...or so their dialogue would have you believe....

We also get some fun, whispered crowd dialogue for those willing to take a closer look at the page. Someone remarks that a given hot girl is "not as hot as her brother's ferret's dentist," someone else seems to confuse prognostication with masturbation twice (though, given that this is a Zenescope publication, maybe the guy did get caught predicting the future in class...?), and two other crowd members discuss the apparent visual similarities of popcorn chicken and tater tots.

Through many instances of the fish-milk-fresh, "vampires don't sparkle" joke, we learn that our blonde is named Sara (because Vampire Knight, maybe?), her Hermione Spears ginger friend is Lisa (because Castlevania?), and their Edward Cullen-meets-Lost Boys male friends are Dennis (which would have been a Hotel Transylvania reference if this came out five years later) and Vincent (because Vincent Price). We also get introduced to a cool-but-nerdy-looking guy named Drake (because Blade), whom Sara hits it off with and who will be important later. By which I mean, later in this story, not in Grimm Fairy Tales lore. I felt obligated to qualify that because this story doesn't matter.

And the reason there's an exclusive, vampire-themed cosplay convention in an old wooden building in the middle of nowhere on Halloween during a full moon? Surprise! It's Belinda!

Sara has a bad feeling and wants to go home, but her friends are too horny and method, so they end up getting ambushed on the way back from Bloodfest by three (or suddenly four?) real vampires (or are they?) named Ian (because Ian Somerhalder played a vampire in The Vampire Diaries), Jacob (because Twilight and The Vampire Diaries again), Eddie (because Twilight again), and Sandra (because True Blood), who take them to a second location to feed on them, scare them, get them to join the fun, or...something; honestly, these characters' motivations are dialogued all over the place. But the basic idea is that somebody (probably Belinda) promised them that if they went beyond-method with wanting to be vampires, they would be officially turned.

So...who's the real vampire, if it wasn't the three-to-four wannabes or any of Sara's friends? Surprise! It was Drake all along! His dialogue is badass, and the transformation sequence and the final look of vampire Drake is cool and pretty damned unique.

In the end, everyone but Sara is brutally, gorily killed, Sara is bitten, and Sela arrives in a new outfit that looks kind of like 90s Wonder Woman without the biker jacket, saving what remains of the day with some white eye-blast telekinesis magic and an entire wooden floor's worth of stakes, which she can apparently do at will despite this taking place when it does and Sela being all "I've never used magic to fight before" in the post-Hard Choices issues.

Then, Sela gives Sara a choice of her own: let Sela kill her to end her suffering, or let Sela take her to "the one person who can help you get through this." Yes, comic book word emphasis continues to not make sense. And yes, despite this setting up something potentially cool, we never learn who that "one person" is and we never see Sara again. And, no; no matter how badly the emphasis on that quote makes me want to do it, I will not make a Tim Curry Command & Conquer joke.

Even though this special got in its own way more often than not and ultimately amounted to nothing besides another Sela vs. Belinda incident with collateral damage, the twists and turns of such a simple narrative were pretty cool, the art style was mostly high-level and consistent with 2010s Zenescope, and Drake was a unique and impressive-looking monster-villain.

This vampire tale may not matter, but it doesn't suck, either.

And neither do my Ticketholders, because even though you haven't Become A Ticketholder yet, commented anything at the bottom of any of my posts, or helped out my ad revenue as you read so I don't get turned at a Halloween party, you do remember to follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my vampire-slaying content, and you keep the view count rising.

So GUILT TRIP and thank you for being awesome.

Ticketmaster,

SPAIEZE!