Elvira: Mistress of the Dark #1

I’m pleasantly surprised that Elvira: Mistress of the Dark #1 is more than just a booby book. Yes, there’s a scantily clad woman having adventures, but there’s also snarky humor and an intriguing culture clash premise.

Artist Dave Acosta shows lots of cleavage, of course, but that’s the premise of Elvira. There is also storytelling and emphasis on her expressions as a character, not just body-part framing (although you will see plenty of bustlines).

As written by David Avallone, we start with Elvira about to rewrite the script for the movie she’s working on to make it less stinky. (She’s got brains! And puns!) But she falls into a mystic casket and wakes up to meet Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. They don’t really know what to make of her pop culture references, as you’d expect, and I liked the way Mary is encouraged in her writing. Elvira, while making break-the-fourth-wall asides, helps them look for their missing friend John Polidori, seized by a mysterious force while they were telling ghost stories.

This issue was fun escapism, with a well-chosen cliffhanger, and I’d read another. (#2 is due out August 22.) Particularly since there are questions left about the villain that I’m sure will come back around before this four-issue miniseries ends.

Cover by Joseph Michael Linsner

Overall, this may seem like faint praise, but at least reading this didn’t make me feel creepy after.

Unfortunately, Dynamite is one of those publishers that relies on variant covers to prop up sales, so this title has at least 18 of them — of which 10 were available at your local comic shop — including a $75 signed photo cover. Yay, comics. (The publisher provided a digital review copy.)