Blood: A Tale

AUTHOR: DeMatteis, J. M.

ARTIST: Kent Williams (illustrator); Gaspar Saladino (letterer)

PUBLISHER: DC Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1987

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1997

Publication History

Blood: A Tale was first published in 1987 as a four-issue miniseries by Marvel’s now-defunct Epic line. DC Comics reprinted the series, again as single issues, under its Vertigo imprint ten years later. There have been two paperback editions, the first in 1997 and the second in 2005, both from DC’s Vertigo. As of 2011, the work is out of print.

Kent Williams was one of three illustrators of the well-received series Moonshadow (1985-1987), written by Jon J. Muth. Williams had also done cover art for Marvel and interior art for other comics companies, namely Eclipse Comics. Based on his prior collaboration with Williams, Muth suggested Williams to J. M. DeMatteis for Blood.

DeMatteis wrote a significant amount of mainstream comics and graphic novel stories prior and subsequent to Blood: A Tale, most notably the autobiographical Brooklyn Dreams (1994), which is included on the American Library Association’s (ALA) list of ten best graphic novels.

Plot

Blood: A Tale appeared during the heyday of creator-owned works in the mid- to late 1980’s. The work is experimental in form, using few word balloons and utilizing paintings as the primary form of illustration. While it presents itself as a vampire story, it is more properly a nightmare and an allegory.

In the first chapter, “Ouroborous,” a young girl tells a story to a dead king. A river of blood flows into a sea, which gives up a thorny pod that is found by a young girl. Inside she finds a baby. An elder tells her she can nurture the boy. When the child comes of age, he studies at a monastery. When he is given leadership of the monastery, the boy rebels, slays the teacher, and leaves. Encountering others, he is told his name is Blood. He denies the name and shoots the tribal elder. His gun becomes a snake. He wakes from his dream.

In chapter two, “Communion,” Blood discovers he has become a vampire. He feeds. When he wakes from his delirium, he meets “the Woman.” She tells him the two of them are different from the others, as they are neither human nor vampire. In a sensual embrace, he drinks blood from her breasts. They bond, leave the vampire pack, and discover Little One in a tree. The three form an ersatz family and travel.

The three characters discover a deserted airplane. Blood’s hungers return. He kills a charging black panther. Caught in a storm, the three hide in a cave, where they see the slain Elder. The Elder becomes a cave painting, pointing to a rope ladder heading out of the cave. Climbing the rope ladder, Blood leaves the cave alone. He exits the cave through a manhole cover, thus becoming a modern man; he is wearing a suit and is late for work.

In chapter three, “Theophany,” Blood is married to a woman who is expecting their child. He harbors fading dreams of rock stardom. When she confesses to having an affair, he reenters the previous world in visions, including one in which he sees a bandaged man. Blood has cancer and again sees visions. He unwraps the bandages and sees the slain elder, who tells him not to worry. Leaping into an open manhole, he returns to the other world.

The Woman questions and then comforts him. As Blood and the Woman prepare to die together, Little One begs them not to. He floats to a painting of the Woman on a rock wall and flies at its door, dying. The door opens. A lake of blood rushes out. Blood and the Woman cradle Little One’s corpse. Elders approach in a floating ark and demand the body of Little One, to take to Isle of the Dead. Blood and the Woman vow to bring him back.

In chapter four, “Ouroborous,” Blood and the Woman fly as bats to the Isle of the Dead, find Little One, and see Father and Brother, now soulless and with no memory of Blood and the Woman. Blood begs their forgiveness. The island becomes a jagged rock. The two stand atop it. The Woman is pregnant. She dies giving birth. Blood throws the newborn into the storm, proclaiming his love for the Woman. He falls asleep. He wakes to a drumbeat and joins the marching Silent Ones. As he marches, his “selves” fade and merge until he falls, hitting his head. Looking up, he sees a tomb. His Elder is in front, again telling him not to worry. Blood kneels and goes to the door of the tomb, which opens, revealing Blood behind it. Inside, he encounters everyone he knew and loved. A flintlock pistol discharges. Blood dies. The sea consumes his body, and he is taken back to his birth in the thorny pod. The story starts again.

Characters

•The King is a dead monarch. A young girl, nameless throughout and functioning as a Greek chorus, tells him the stories of Blood, framing each chapter. The King has been dead for more than a year as the young girl begins telling him the stories that comprise the bulk of the narrative.

•Blood, a.k.a. the Boy, is the protagonist. As the stories begin, he has floated in a thorny casket from a sea of blood to clear waters. He is found by a woman, who nurtures him until he is taken to a monastery, where he meets the elder known only as Father and learns the mysteries of life.

•Father tutors Blood. His lessons are rote. He responds to Blood’s questions with blows, followed by kind words and hugs. When Father tells Blood that he will be his successor, Blood rebels and kills him. After his death, he reappears periodically to Blood and to the Woman.

•Little One is an amorphous fetal being with a stout, thick body and stumps for limbs; he is encased in a sort of spacesuit. He floats at Blood’s eye level, despite being half his height. He asks many questions and has few answers, but he provides Blood with some small comfort. Despite his truncated body, he has a fully mature face, seen in only two panels. His behavior is that of a petulant child, needy and fearful.

•The Woman is Blood’s lover, nurturer, and occasional food source. She teaches him and needs him and is a companion, a wife, a mother, and a spiritual guide for him. By turns bringer and recipient of knowledge, she is a totem for female mysteries.

•The Silent Ones serve as stand-ins for the masses. They are unthinking and behave tribally. Their main goals are duty and persuasion. They do not act as individuals.

Artistic Style

Williams is a painter who studied at Pratt Institute. His approach to visual narrative is driven by color and pose. His style is loose and energetic but is anatomically accurate. Almost every page of Blood: A Tale functions as an independent painting, even when panels are used. The environments used in the story, primarily in watercolors, are sparse and lack detail but are rich in mood. When combined with the tense, often-abstract text, these create a feeling that drives the narrative more than the words do. This is surprising, since of the 192 pages of story, 19 rely on blocks of text as the dominant visual element. Most of these pages use small, equally sized border illustrations as support for the text. This is a variation of the conventional use of words and images in comics or graphic novels.

Williams also made a deliberate decision to minimize other conventions of the format. Only 75 pages, less than half the book, use word balloons at all. None of the balloons are mechanically drawn; all are freehand. Some contain only symbols, and a few are completely empty. However, all text is typeset and not hand rendered. Sound effects are used, but they are painted and are seen as part of the images.

Themes

Writer DeMatteis describes Blood: A Tale as “an odd, eerie fever-dream of a story set in an odd, eerie fever-dream of a world.” The primary themes of this work are the contradictions of life and universal fears. The book begins with a living person describing birth to a dead one. Rivers of blood and water, coupled with a thorny cradle from which Blood is pulled, serve as birth metaphors.

The names are iconic. Blood is life and death. As a vampire, he must be both. Blood’s refusal to accept his vampiric nature echoes humans’ unwillingness to accept their animal natures.

Blood responds to knowledge passively, accepting what he is told rather than dealing with the pain of questioning it. He kills his teacher rather than accept responsibility for teaching others. Paradoxically, he kills to resist causing pain. When he is given the truth of his vampiric nature, he slays his teacher.

Blood’s climb up the rope ladder out of the cave gives dual messages. This is the lonely journey to awareness. Passage out of a small tunnel in the roof of a cave is yet another birth metaphor.

When Blood emerges into a more mundane world, the reader is given the sense that this world is also a dream, or that Blood’s first world is the real one and the reader’s is the dream. The characters he encounters in this world, his friend Warren and his wife Helen, feel less real to the reader and to him than the iconic beings in his original world.

Blood joins the march of the Silent Ones. His death is alluded to repeatedly in the story, but this death appears final. He encounters the sage he had killed earlier, who offers him comfort.

Blood hits his head on a rock. The wound from this injury takes the appearance of a third eye and echoes the same image on the forehead of his slain teacher. As Blood dies, the story returns almost word for word to its beginning, implying a never-ending cycle. The first and last chapters have the same title, “Ouroborous,” which refers to a worm or snake biting its own tail to make a full circle.

Impact

Originally published by Epic Comics, Blood: A Tale is a product of its time in comic history. Nested in the late Bronze Age to early Modern Age of comics, it was promoted as part of a creator-owned line of properties. Creator-owned work was a response to litigation from older creators and to similar contracts being offered by newer publishers. This circumstance made the reprinting of the work under DC’s Vertigo possible a decade later.

Opinion on DeMatteis’s story has always been divided because of its more elusive aspects. However, Williams’s art was well received and led to other lucrative and successful graphic novel projects, including the 1992 Tell Me Dark and his 2005 collaboration with filmmaker Darren Aronofsky on the graphic novel The Fountain. Most significantly, taken in conjunction with Williams’s earlier work on Moonshadow, Blood: A Tale served as a template for the painted graphic novel.

Further Reading

Aronofsky, Darren, and Kent Williams. The Fountain (2005).

DeMatteis, J. M., et al. The Compleat Moonshadow (1998).

Muth, Jon J. M (2008).

Wagner, Karl Edward, John Ney Rieber, and Kent Williams. Tell Me Dark (1992).

Bibliography

Voger, Mark. The Dark Age. Raleigh, N.C.: TwoMorrows, 2006.

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2007.