Comic Review: Loaded Bible: Blood of my Blood #6

Loaded Bible: Blood of my Blood #6

Publisher: Image Comics

Writer: Steve Orlando & Tim Seeley

Art: Giuseppe Cafaro

Colors: Josh Rodriguez

Letters: Maurizio Clausi & Fabio Amelia

  Once coming upon the synopsis for this series I was incredulous, to say the least. However, seeing that Tim Seeley was involved I was curious. Seeley has been one of those writers that I enjoy keeping track of due to the quality of work he usually provides. For a bit of context, Loaded Bible takes place in a world where humanity, led by the Catholic Church, fought a war against vampires. In order to gain some fighting chance, the church cloned Jesus Christ himself but the cloned rebelled. Loaded Bible: Blood of my Blood (BOMB) takes place decades after the start of the said war and now humanity is divided amongst two fronts: one is led by one of the many clones of Jesus and the other is led by an alliance between vampires and the catholic church led by none other Dracula himself. In the action-packed conclusion of this sequel to the original series, Jesus reaches Dracula’s Red Note machine and must fight Sistine Centuria, who is being enslaved by Dracula as his wife. The writing for the whole of the sequel was a lot campier than in the original series. It feels a lot less consequential whenever the writers set up risky situations because, in the end, it’s Jesus and he’s got an army with him as well as high-tech weapons. Plus every single character has some quip at hand for every situation. In any case, I feel that this sequel was planned to be a lot more light-hearted and fun than the original. The entire issue is composed of cool fight scenes with twists back and forth. It’s set up, delivery and repeat, which is why the conclusion kind of falls flat since all of the fighting doesn’t even make much of a difference. Also, Sistine’s return was just kind of a random reference to the previous series. Her character had no impact on the story whatsoever. However cheesy the story may be, the artwork follows through on the action scenes – this is positive since this is around 80% of this series. Though Cafaro’s anatomy presents some inconsistencies from time to time, the motion depictions really make this book nice to look at. Nothing out of what we’re used to seeing, but still keeps the punches constantly impactful. The coloring complements this aspect of the comic quite nicely trading some of the realism for cool shots. The lettering completes the punch-packing trifecta contained in the artwork for the team with awesome and varied sound effects. Despite its very interesting synopsis Loaded Bible: BOMB fails to live up to its predecessor. If the original series had a weird and cool theme whilst also having a compelling story and characters the sequel focused only on the first part and forgot the latter. It’s a fun action comic but fails to innovate in any way.