Elvira Meets Vincent Price #01

Elvira Meets Vincent Price #01

Dynamite Entertainment 2021

Written by David Avallone

Illustrated by Juan Samu

Coloured by Walter Pereyra

Lettered by Taylor Esposito & Elizabeth Sharland

Elvira is back, with her most historic AND greatest costar ever! The ghost of Vincent Price is a spirit with a mission, and only the Mistress of the Dark can help! The Apocalypse is coming, and it’s going to be live-streamed for binge-watching, but a long-lost movie can save the world… if only the movie star specter and the horror hostess with the mostest can find it in time! Thrills, chills, and all sorts of terrible puns!

Have I mentioned lately how much of a fan of David’s that I am? Eddie and Elvira open up the book and I have to say the ideas that they pitch are spectacular and I do hope that eventually David gets to tell all of these stories and hopefully sooner rather than later. Also I do love that this is Elvira and that nothing is too ridiculous for us to see within these pages and it’s kind of like taking a bit of artistic liberty at times which I’m totally okay with and seeing her love of and influence of Vincent Price kind of fuels his restless spirit to pay her a visit.

I am absolutely loving the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented exceptionally well. The character development that we see through the dialogue, the character interaction as well as how they act and react to the situations and circumstances which they encounter helps to portray them as people that we know, know of, relate to or simply empathise with. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing the story, the characters and this world we’re pulled into this beautifully.

I greatly appreciate the way that we see this being structured as well as how we see the layers within the story emerge, grow and strengthen as the pages go forward. The layers are where we see the characterisation and the plot twists plus so much more and whether they work with the main arc or swirl around it they all add depth, dimension and complexity to the story. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as how it moves the story forward is impeccably achieved.

I’m totally digging the interiors here. The linework is fantastic. It's clean, crisp and strong and how we see the varying weights and techniques being utilsied to create the detail in the work that we see throughout the book is amazing. While I’m pretty impressed with the backgrounds that we see I would like to see more as they really do enhance and expand the moments. They also work well within the composition of the panels to bring out the depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the story. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a remarkably talented eye for storytelling. The colour work is brilliantly rendered. The various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work shows a stellar eye for how colour works. Plus the black & white with gray tones is utterly phenomenal to see.

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This is the kind of fun that comics need to be at times. We get so many different books that take themselves way too seriously that to have a balancing act like this one is beyond anything that I could have hoped for. Two icons of horror in one book and not being done through the miracle of time travel or both being alive simultaneously nope one is a ghost and it’s perfectly done. With intelligent writing and witty characterisation wrapped up in these perfectly suited interiors make for such a rip roaring good ole time.