Some might question the logic of this new direction for Dynamite characters which focus on retelling their stories in an alternate reality setting.  It first started with Legenderry in 2013, as a steampunk re-imagining of Dynamite’s most notable characters, and it continued recently with the launch of individual Legenderry titles as well as with the new alternate reality series Altered States.  Designed as a sequence of one-shots, Altered States takes the normal Dynamite characters and puts them in a different setting and with different backgrounds.

In this story, Vampirella is reimagined as a space explorer by the name of Ella.  On a somewhat routine journey to Venus in the not so distance future, her ship along with its crew is thrown into another corner of the universe, where she is left to fend for herself on an alien planet.  The planet is populated with people that look a little like they might belong on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom, but so too is it populated with another group of people, somewhat vampiric in appearance that Ella must help to battle.  In the progress of the story there are enough ties to her own story to make fans realize that it is in fact Vampirella, but also enough of the new twists to impress.

Although the concept risks being too much of a parody of itself, it still works with the fresh approach to the story.  One of the better examples is the use of the name Ella, as she does become Vampirella in a sense, just perhaps not in the way that the readers might have expected.  More so, the success of this series is the injection of new inspirations into an old character.  Those inspirations themselves might be borrowed from other genres as well, but the formula works well here, and despite being a one-shot, this will likely leave fans wanting more.

Story: Nancy A. Collins  Art: Francesco Manna
Story: 9.0 Art: 9.0 Overall: 9.0 Recommendation: Buy

Dynamite provided Graphic Policy with a free copy for review