Books: Blood + Volume 1 TPB

It’s fascinating to discover all the different ways a given franchise can be implemented, and Blood: The Last Vampire has been put through its paces pretty aggressively now. What started as a 50-minute feature has been turned into a standalone novel, a forthcoming live-action feature — and now a new TV series, with a few manga and a novel spun off from that in turn as well. Each iteration of the story has its own particular flavor, for better or worse — and in the case of the novel Night of the Beasts, it was definitely for the worse.

Blood+, the manga by Asuka Katsura, may have been derived most directly from the TV series but it deviates from the show about as much as it’s also faithful to it. The basic setup is the same, but it’s played off in a markedly different way — different enough in some aspects that it almost counts as its own separate story. But it also touches on many of the same conceits as the TV show, even if it doesn’t arrive at them in quite the same fashion.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.