Zenescope - Omnibusted #65: Vampires - The Eternal
a.k.a. The Eternal Omnibuster.
Maybe not quite eternal, because I'm just some aging mortal publishing my thoughts into the æther while computers occupy our physical, mental, and emotional lives, everything is an overpriced service you can't own because disposable income doesn't exist anymore, and Japanese robots get the opportunity to win an American reality competition for humans judged by a Canadian, a Scott, a Colombian, a German, and a Brit. Psycho TV, indeed.
My point isn't about the "non-American" opinions influencing the results of a particular genre of television (diverse opinions are among the most American ideals possible, and the influence is more in the hands of the roomful of screaming idiots behind them and the inconsistent act-to-act production value that gets hashed out backstage because bias is everywhere) because I'm not a hateful, racist asshole like those "fascism is misunderstood, ackshully" eX-Twitter twats I run into online occasionally. The "AGT judges are dual citizens" thing has been a "joke" for as long as I can remember. My real issue is the slippery slope that's getting Acme axle-greased as we speak if we let robots win a human talent competition. The "humans need talent to build and program dancing robots" argument has used what ground it has for as long as it can, and said ground is eroding under the machines' weight as we speak. That's a job skill, not a talent. Humans have talents. Talent deserves to win talent shows. Humans deserve to win talent shows with their talents. Not. Fucking. Robots.
Follow-up point: the world sucks (pun intended), and I helped make it that way. Not by voting for those currently in power in my country (I have common sense), but by growing up in and contributing to 90s commercial culture, which has shaped the media we consume today and influenced the intelligence (and lack thereof) of subsequent generations. Do as I say, not as I've done, or the next live-action Disney remake will be Wall-E, starring us. I don't need to tell you what characters we are (or maybe I do because of what characters we are).
Speaking of talent, though, I hope you all enjoyed the little flashback to my youth that I shared last Monday. For a bit of experimentation, I wrote some new verses to the "Desert Life" poem and put the updated version on Patreon for $3. So now, I'm a cynic, false immortal, Omnibuster, mad scientist, and possible fool. But whatever you call me, I'm still a Blogger at heart. So let's get to talking about Vampires: The Eternal.
Unleashed Tie-In
Vampires: The Eternal
Before I begin, if you're out of the loop, check out my previous Unleashed reviews of A Shadow Falls, The Game, Day Breaks (which explains my revised plans for the coming weeks because the Zenescope wiki's reading order was wrong), and Hunters: The Shadowlands (the latter two of which are linked above).
In the Hunters miniseries, Vampires: The Eternal is referenced in an Editor's Note as being Samira's origin story, and that's only partly true.
In keeping with the Unleashed event's lack of will to commit to a timeline, we cold-open on a woman being chased. This stretch of five pages is one twist after another despite not being of much consequence to the story, but does a lot to establish Samira's ruthless nature and contradiction of a superiority complex.
Flashback to Oxford, England in 1348 (a place and time, yay!), when a mortal Samira was at the mercy of the Black Death. That goes double because not only is she about to die of the actual plague that had hit its epidemic peak at the time, but she is soon turned by a member of a vampire "collective" also calling themselves the Black Death. Again feeding (puns!) into her character establishment, they comment on her religious devotion (an easily corruptible asset, as we know) and plague-tainted blood.
Back in the present, Samira returns to the arctic sky palace that the Being made for her in Day Breaks, where she's gathered a brain trust of witches and wizards (some captured under duress, maybe?) to construct a vampire-detection and teleportation system, which guides her and Ravenous to Paris. The low-angle panel of them arriving in front of the Eiffel Tower is gorgeous, so spend as much time on it as you like because what follows is a long-winded speech from Samira about faith and destiny and hardship and togetherness under her one, true god and master while you're counting and recognizing the silhouettes she's talking at and waiting painfully for the obvious reveal that after roughly seven centuries, she's found the Order Of the Black Death again. Great thematic juxtaposition with Sela and the Hunters here (since Samira is kind of set up as the focal villain of the event despite not being the main threat, and the Black Death are basically her lost quartet, assuming they make it out of this three-parter), but that speech was agony.
Immediately, we get a sense of how well the Black Death collective (which sounds like a psychedelic goth band from the sixties) are going to fare in Samira's company, as she has a long memory for both love and hate.
There's Blaine (who is insane but not a pain, nor a train) the de-facto leader who sired Samira so she kind of has the hots for him, Fatima and Mund, who are also there, and Vanessa the high-society blonde from the B Cover by Sean Chen and Juan Fernandez. She is Blaine's sire, and wanted to leave Samira for dead when the collective first found her, so she's obviously marked for death (which is probably preferable to watching Marked For Death). Also, France has its own anti-Highborn hit squad...or did until they realized Vampires aren't of the Realms and can't be killed by conventional weapons.
As the flashback continues into 1680s Spain (where the reign of Blaine falls mainly on the plain), he drops lore that Death is a woman (so, say goodbye to Morrigan, Alicia, Hades—not so much—and Nox, because when Keres gets here, there will be No Tomorrow...except that she's already appeared in Down the Rabbit Hole, but this is meant to be one of those "read too fast and you'll miss it" kinds of things that makes a second reading like this really fun), and Samira leaves the group over creative differences (the Black Death want to live a comfortable eternity in Europe, and she wants to conquer the New World like the lovechild of Blackbeard and Yoko Ono).
Back in the present day, Samira brings the Black Death to the arctic sky palace, we learn that Blaine likes pain and Vanessa (obviously) isn't keen on living at the mercy of her mortal-minded, infantile grand-thrall of a self-proclaimed Queen.
You can't say their relationship has no stakes...!
The final issue begins with Linda (a witch who was working for Samira in exchange for the promise of curing her son's terminal cancer with vampirism) getting a flashback straight out of One Piece (because it explains the sick loved one motivation for warning Samira of a threat she already knew about, and then Linda dies offscreen).
Samira's catfight with Vanessa gets treated with Big Finale Energy and there's tons of background carnage (mostly beheading and dismemberment imagery as Ravenous comes to her aid and the Black Death wreak havoc on the palace), culminating in Samira killing her lover and sire Blaine for his fair-weather faith, granting Linda's request as a dying wish, and reaffirming her own faith in the Being.
I didn't expect to like Samira going into this miniseries, and I don't, because she is a pompous, fanatically religious, petty, gluttonous virus in human form. She's a villain and a monster. Period. That's three periods in a row; I hope she's thirsty.... But contrary to what modern, media-illiterate discourse believes, fictional villains don't have to be likable to be compelling, and the things that make her unlikable (as well as the one, potentially likable quality she has—that being her Queenly honor) are what make her compelling.
Not the peak of Shandian writing as plots go (if you've seen one "sanctuary" narrative before, you've also seen all the other allegories for why we can't have nice things), and pretty predictable (everyone you expect to die, dies), but as a supplemental character study, it's solid, and the art (by Vittorio Garofoli and Slamet Mujiono) is gorgeous.
Van Helsing
Speaking of great character pieces, this trilogy of shorts was published at the end of each issue of Vampires: The Eternal, and follows Liesel Van Helsing from her return from the Shadowlands (an absence she defines at one hundred years) to her mid-fight reunion with Sela in Day Breaks.
On her quest to reunite with the other Hunters and "the sister [her] father didn't survive to give" (damn, that's powerful), Van Helsing learns to cope with a century of monster PTSD and temporal displacement...and to use the internet. This shows that the events of The Summoning happened fairly recently, but also mentions Bad Girls, The Lockdown, and The Return, so now she knows that Sela is alive.
Liesel's quest continues in Masumi: the Silent Assassin, where internet searches for supernatural activity unite the Unleashed event's two best new characters, as the title suggests. It's short and uneventful, and the exposition censors "God" like Zenescope is trying to please the illusory monetization standards of the YouTube algorithm or something, but there's a little bit of existentialism talk about whether they're back on Earth or in a special kind of Hell (which isn't censored?) before Masumi uses her swords to transport Van Helsing to Sela.
Finally, Van Helsing: Timelost brings us to the midst of battle, where she and Sela were reunited as previously mentioned.
Cut to what looks like the Inner Sanctum (so Samantha is there offscreen, maybe, but you know how strongholds can be in the Grimm Universe...), presumably after Belinda rescued everyone because she's actually there, and the found sisters hash out their century-long baggage of grief, remorse, and mild jealousy really damned quick. I also found it mildly amusing that Belinda (who is largely to blame for Sela not trying to free the Hunters or stop the Being, on account of all the Timepiece-related memory manipulation) is just chilling in the corner with an ancient tome while they reconnect.
Stay Tuned for my final live-action Goj-Year-ra project review while I binge To Your Eternity and work on my big milestone project.
As always, please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (none of you have yet), leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, helping out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Patreon, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
9
Omnibuster,
Out.
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