Waffleface, The Vampire Slayer: Pinocchio: Of Wood and Blood Parts 1 and 2 Review
EDITOR’S NOTE: This review is based on a review copy of Pinocchio: Of Wood and Blood Part 2 provided free of charge to Crisis On Infinite Midlives by pubisher Slave Labor Graphics and writer Van Jensen.
Pinocchio is a bad motherfucker.
Pinocchio: Of Wood and Blood is the concluding chapter of Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, which Amanda and I came across completely by accident at San Diego Comic-Con in 2011 at the Slave Labor Graphics booth. We picked it up based purely on the title – how can you not give a book named Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer a try? If we’d seen a book titled Cinderella: Street Vigilante we’d have bought that too – and were delighted to find an action-packed, funny story about Pinocchio and his puppet crew hunting down vampires by telling lies (think along the lines of, “I will take no joy in staking your dead ass and dragging it screaming into the daylight”), which grows his nose and gives him a handy, on-demand wooden stake for bringing the stabby.
Pinocchio: Of Wood and Blood is the final chapter of writer Van Jensen’s and artist Dusty Higgins’s story, opening with Pinocchio having turned into a real boy (already making it a more satisfying story than A.I. Artificial Intelligence) and searching for his kidnapped love, Carlotta. The search brings Pinocchio and his puppet buddies from deserted islands to abandoned Romanian towns, via balloon and horse chases, to the castle of Vlad Tepes, and a confrontation with Dracula himself. And the journey leads Pinocchio to make sacrifice after sacrifice, from his hard-earned humanity, to his relationships, to eventually, much, much more.
At face value, there’s nothing really new going on under the hood of this story. A gang of irreverent, wisecracking vampire hunters going after Dracula isn’t something you can really even pretend is groundbreaking when the concept is at least as old as the opening of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer season five, if not the end of season one. But Jensen does an excellent job with those standard elements, starting with the simple humor in the story. These characters are fucking funny, and make the book a joy to read, even when the action dies down. Seeing things like Pinocchio muttering to the ghost of Jiminy Cricket riding on his shoulder whether you call a group of vampires a gaggle or a pod or a murder while being chased by a pack (I’ve decided that’s the correct term) of vampires, or a bunch of sentient kitchen implements arguing whether they should call the trivet “Trivet” or “Waffleface,” or Pinocchio saying, “You have flawless skin,” to a vampire to grow an handy stake from his face are just plain fun.
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