Well a new Bloodrayne and a story teller, as well as a new artist. Steven O’connell tells a story that should have been much more intriguing. The story opens with an apparently random battle scene, but at least they mention the demons she’s fighting are on her way to the real target. So it makes sense to be fighting some other enemies along the way. At least O’connell opened it in a decent way, though opening with a battle scene is becoming tiresome for me. Rayne is sent by Brimstone to take care of a giant serpent that’s apparently causing trouble somewhere. Before she can get to her target location she meets another enemy named Tiger Wraith. Here’s the thing I don’t fully get about Rayne, Tiger Wraith flatly says out she doesn’t want to fight with Rayne, but Rayne flies off the handle and attacks her anyway. I mean you find out a little bit about Tiger Wraith, but I kind of wanted to know more about her and it’s hard to do that in the heat of a battle. Amidst this new battle the real target shows its face and swallows Rayne. Tiger Wraith tries to help her and upon getting released from the belly of the beast Rayne is turned into DarkRayne. She looks awesome! That’s all I have to say. White hair, cool tattoos and more intense blades. But seriously… why did this happen to her? None of this is explained. That’s where the poor story format kind of comes into the fold and that’s kind of disappointing. Not to mention Ephemera shows up out of nowhere for a couple panels, and just seems wasted. It’s like he kept trying to cram as much as possible into a single issue. The story is better than we see in the first two, but it’s not nearly as developmentally sound as Troy Wall’s script. Maybe next time…
Anyway, new artist Rob Delatorre did a really good job on this comic. Again not to the caliber of Molenaar, but he’s the best artist working on Bloodrayne since then. His design concepts for Tiger Wraith and DarkRayne were phenomenal. I wasn’t too into his rendition of the demons or snake monster, but his illustrations of the two new character concepts were the best. He’s really the only reason why I want to see these characters more often! If anything I do hope they come back in the guise with a different writer to give us a little more background on who they are and how Rayne turns into DarkRayne.
Like the other BloodRayne comics they’re keeping up the standard one thousand variant covers for every issue it seems. Molenaar even makes a return appearance to do one of the covers. There’s some really strong art for this issue in the variants and I actually didn’t mind tracking them all down. My favorite is by far the one by Delatorre featuring DarkRayne on a white background. There’s just something powerful about the drawing.
Overall this is a decent issue, not astounding. The script is almost too cheesy at times for me to really buy into it. Again they need to start putting together three issue mini series or get someone that can write a contained short one issue story. It seems like the changing of writers is causing a problem where they like Bloodrayne a lot and want to do all kinds of different things. The problem is they have limited space so they just cram it all in there anyway leaving a seemingly incoherent story, which puts the readers off because there are TOO many questions left unanswered. Like in “Seeds of Sin” where Christina Z introduced the blood drinking monks at Brimstone, no one’s even taken that thread up. In fact that seems to have been done away with when Wall stepped in. Bloodrayne needs a primary story writer that is a little more formatted that can connect the issues better. One shots are okay if they’re just a random adventure like “Lycan Rex” but the other authors keep bringing in these new possible story arcs and different characters. “Lycan Rex” was at least a self contained tale and didn’t do anything that required another author to finish up the new mystery.
Overall Rating: 2.5 out of 5