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A review by helpfulsnowman
Dracula: The Company of Monsters Vol. 1 by Daryl Gregory, Kurt Busiek
2.0
The minute I finished this I was sure what I wanted to say about it. Then another minute went by and I thought, “Wait a minute. Why the hell did I read a Dracula comic in the first place?”
Credit where credit is due, I have to take some of the blame for reading this one. Because there is really no excuse for reading another Dracula book. There just isn’t. Mark Waid did his best to try and invent one for me, but that might have only made things worse.
We all know Dracula as the guy who kicked ass, impaled mofos, and did a bunch of evil magic shit to turn himself into a vampire. Until now, however, we didn’t really appreciate him as a shrewd businessman, because after all, what is a medieval country if not the equivalent of a modern-day big company?
Therefore, the characters conclude, if we want to instigate the hostile takeover of another company, the easiest way of going about it would be to resurrect Dracula and use his powers of magical persuasion to convince CEO’s to sell their companies to us, an extremely costly and dangerous endeavor that will force us to close a bunch of plants in order to shore up enough cash to get everything rolling.
With that reasonable, well thought-out, foolproof, unambitious, clearly defined plan with no real endgame, I don’t see how anything could go wrong.
It reads a little bit like one of those weird business books where we try to learn business plans from the unlikeliest of sources. Like “How to Manage Like Oscar the Grouch” with chapter titles like “Managing in the Can: the Essence of Hands-Off Management.” Dracula is presented as being a good manager because he worked out a small country and fought battles with swords and shit. I’m no historian, and I am certainly no city planner, however I would say that a city surrounded by people staked on large poles that were intentionally blunted and greased to increase both the pain and the sliding action is not a city that is operating in a sustainable, realistic fashion that is enjoyable for all. Just a hunch.
Even if I were convinced that Dracula was a great middle manager at heart, I think it’s still a tough sell to convince me that we really should bring him back to life in order to solve some kind of problem. For starters, trying to create what sounds like a great business plan out of sheer craziness is a little hard to swallow. It would be like watching the Social Network, and halfway through the Mark Zuckerberg character decides that they need a great mathematician to help out, and because Egyptians were known to be very mathematical, they decide to resurrect a mummy. Or maybe we take it in an Air Bud sort of direction and bring back a lagoon creature to be on the high school swim team. It’ll be a great laugh when he’s filling in his age on the form and has to say 4389, huh?
And of course, we have our crew of vampire hunters which consists of the standard formula: hot babe, crazy person, and one guy who seems sort of effective, or at least big.
It’s partially my fault for picking it up, but rarely does a book combine so fluidly two of my strong disinterests: business and vampires.
This last part goes out to CEO’s, business people, and anyone in a movie, book, or whatever who comes up with a crazy scheme involving evil forces or super-powered robots or anything of the such:
Whatever you do, just kill the thing the second it starts fooling around. Don’t give into its demands for a nighttime rooftop meeting, don’t give it a telephone that it rewires into a deadly taser, none of that shit. Just make it do what you want and then throw it in a goddamn volcano.
Credit where credit is due, I have to take some of the blame for reading this one. Because there is really no excuse for reading another Dracula book. There just isn’t. Mark Waid did his best to try and invent one for me, but that might have only made things worse.
We all know Dracula as the guy who kicked ass, impaled mofos, and did a bunch of evil magic shit to turn himself into a vampire. Until now, however, we didn’t really appreciate him as a shrewd businessman, because after all, what is a medieval country if not the equivalent of a modern-day big company?
Therefore, the characters conclude, if we want to instigate the hostile takeover of another company, the easiest way of going about it would be to resurrect Dracula and use his powers of magical persuasion to convince CEO’s to sell their companies to us, an extremely costly and dangerous endeavor that will force us to close a bunch of plants in order to shore up enough cash to get everything rolling.
With that reasonable, well thought-out, foolproof, unambitious, clearly defined plan with no real endgame, I don’t see how anything could go wrong.
It reads a little bit like one of those weird business books where we try to learn business plans from the unlikeliest of sources. Like “How to Manage Like Oscar the Grouch” with chapter titles like “Managing in the Can: the Essence of Hands-Off Management.” Dracula is presented as being a good manager because he worked out a small country and fought battles with swords and shit. I’m no historian, and I am certainly no city planner, however I would say that a city surrounded by people staked on large poles that were intentionally blunted and greased to increase both the pain and the sliding action is not a city that is operating in a sustainable, realistic fashion that is enjoyable for all. Just a hunch.
Even if I were convinced that Dracula was a great middle manager at heart, I think it’s still a tough sell to convince me that we really should bring him back to life in order to solve some kind of problem. For starters, trying to create what sounds like a great business plan out of sheer craziness is a little hard to swallow. It would be like watching the Social Network, and halfway through the Mark Zuckerberg character decides that they need a great mathematician to help out, and because Egyptians were known to be very mathematical, they decide to resurrect a mummy. Or maybe we take it in an Air Bud sort of direction and bring back a lagoon creature to be on the high school swim team. It’ll be a great laugh when he’s filling in his age on the form and has to say 4389, huh?
And of course, we have our crew of vampire hunters which consists of the standard formula: hot babe, crazy person, and one guy who seems sort of effective, or at least big.
It’s partially my fault for picking it up, but rarely does a book combine so fluidly two of my strong disinterests: business and vampires.
This last part goes out to CEO’s, business people, and anyone in a movie, book, or whatever who comes up with a crazy scheme involving evil forces or super-powered robots or anything of the such:
Whatever you do, just kill the thing the second it starts fooling around. Don’t give into its demands for a nighttime rooftop meeting, don’t give it a telephone that it rewires into a deadly taser, none of that shit. Just make it do what you want and then throw it in a goddamn volcano.