Dracula, Motherf**ker!

De Campi (Bad Girls) applies the edgy, genre film approach of her Grindhouse series as she ingeniously drops Bram Stoker’s marquee monster into a pulpy 1970s L.A., mixing up crime noir, blaxploitation, and anime influences. In Vienna, 1889, a trio of femme fatales tire of their bloodsucker husband and nail him inside a coffin. Stoker’s Dracula is replaced by Henderson with a hideous beastlike phantom, who awakens when a fading starlet cracks his coffin at a groovy ’70s féte. Quincy Harker is reimagined as a Black crime scene photographer selling salacious pics to sleazy tabloids in the City of Angels, and he comes within a fang’s bite of becoming another Renfield before being rescued by one of the nameless undead Brides. Harker and the trio bond to take on the prince of darkness in an orgy of transmogrific mayhem. Henderson (The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series) displays an acrobatic visual vocabulary, with elastic facial expressions and spectacular creature effects. The slim volume packs in action, avoids exposition, and lets the art carry characterizations rather than rely on dialogue dumps. This feminist-friendly evolution of the Brides of Dracula mashes up pop culture and classic references from a comics maverick to offer dizzy, delicious fun for horror fans. [em](Oct.) [/em]