Blade (Vol. 5) #1

Background

Blade's back in a new series of him kicking vampire butt and taking names. Well, more so him blowing the bejesus out of the blood-sucking nasties, and not caring who they were.

Story 'Splinter Group'

The story starts out with Blade and Spider-Man throwing down in a school, where a vampire apparently bit Spidey. and Blade is attempting to subdue our Webbed hero (which he promptly does). Once he manages to take Spider-Man out of the action (not by killing him, but by knee-capping him and putting him down for the count). Blade goes after the real Count; Dracula that is.

Blade shoves a wooden shiv into the master vampire's chest, and then kills several dozen students who have been afflicted. Spider-Man is wheeled away - the web-slinger still has pointy teeth, but Blade is confident that the radioactive blood will kill the enzymes responsible for his conversion.

Of course, Blade doesn't explain how Spidey will ever walk again, he just says Spidey should probably "get his kneecaps fixed". This is madness. Though Spider-Man tends to heal faster than most, typically nobody ever heals a shattered kneecap. So faster won't help him at all here. Even under Marvel Universe rules, Spidey looks crippled for life - which makes this a stupid piece of writing.

But that's the end of the Spidey appearance. Now we just need to wrap up the rest of this silliness. So, as we were saying. Upon pick-up by SHIELD Blade turns both Spidey and the dead vampire lord over to the G-men. Only he notices that something is wrong with the agents, and follows them back to the helicarrier, where he discovers that SHIELD has been overrun by vampires.

Blade then does what AIM and Hydra have never been able to do, and apparently takes out the entire helicarrier. All of this non-stop action is intersperced with flashbacks of a very young Blade in Victorian England were we witness his birth and beginnings as well as the death of his mother at the hands of the vampire Deacon Frost (who is also apparently Blade's father).

General Comments

As writer Marc Guggenheim explains in the text page at the end of the book, this incarnation of Blade has absolutely nothing to do with any previous incarnation of the character we've ever seen. Not in the comics, on the silver screen, or on TV. This is a new Blade, which is obvious by the number of vampires we see as well as his obvious connection to SHIELD.

Overall Rating

I've never was a big Blade fan, and this new incarnation doesn't do anything to convince me to become one now, so I gave the book a 1.5 rating. No offense to the creators on this book, vampires simply don't do anything for me. Still, the book is very well done (drawn by Howard Chaykin, which gets it's rating back up half a point), and (especially as I understand vampires are all the rage these days) looks like it may very well become a hit.

Best of luck boys!

Footnote

Not a good year for Spidey on the un-dead front. He became a zombie in Ultimate Fantastic Four and Marvel Zombies. Now he does the vampire thing, albeit very briefly.

Also, what makes this particular manifestation interesting is that Blade apparently knows that Spidey is Peter Parker, as he calls the masked Spider-Man "Parker" a couple of times, and knows about Spidey's irradiated blood. Yes, yes we know that Peter's been "outed" but it is very clear that this isn't the "normal" Marvel Universe (again, I refer to Blade's obvious association with SHIELD as well as that organization's complete infestation by blood-suckers.