Kristina Queen of Vampires review

The initial few pages of this book set the scene--vampires, lots of sex scenes, mild BDSM, and gorgeous art.

The book follows the lead character, Kristina the vampire, through her lynching, reconstitution and establishment of her place in the modern world. She's not a hero, but she's not completely evil--just a very bad girl.

At least every other page there is a frame of someone naked and/or getting screwed. The vampire has a 'harem' of sex slaves that are good little mind-controlled slaves. Kristina's opponents are a cop and a coroner in a normal relationship. So there's a good balance of rape, master/slave, lesbian, and oral sex, and even one three-way scene.

What I like about this is the art. I'm something of a comic art fan so I really appreciated the detailed and accurate anatomical drawings. The women were well-formed without being ludicrously proportioned and great attention was paid to their pussies. Their breasts looked more real that some of the improved ones on real women. The guys were well muscled, if gifted beyond even porn standards--I guess it's easier to draw larger dicks with good detail. The artists took great care in coloring the panels--every fold of cloth, every ripple of muscle is painted very realistically. In the sex scenes they even illuminate the sheen of bodily juices where appropriate.

This seems to be a porn in comic form--same basic idea of just enough plot to explain how they got from one sex scene to the next. The nice thing about the comic nature is the characters are only as badly-acted as you imagine them to be, and you can go as fast or as slow as you'd like. I liked being able to read slow and really take in the details of the art while my mind filled in the gaps that are idiosyncratic to the comic form.

It also takes after comics in that it's short--48 pages of story. This is about standard for episodes of Manga, and longer than American (some of the old Batman comics were only 10 or 15 pages to an episode), but I've been spoiled by reading collections which are more like 200 pages.

Personally this wasn't that thrilling to me--I prefer pretty fantastical erotic fantasies fantasies (transformation, giantess... pretty out there). Compared to my normal reading (Mercedes Lackey, David Eddings, Anne McCaffery) this didn't have enough character and plot to suck me into a suspension of disbelief--thus getting my head out of the way of my lust. As erotic art it was beautifully rendered--the guys were extremely nice to look at. Too bad there weren't more frames of their full body. The coloring really highlighted their muscle structures, which is something I don't see in the black-and-white art I normally get a hold of. I'd like to see the other volumes of this because I might fall into it more as I follow the characters. And I want to know what the male vampire introduced in the next-to-last page does.