Return to Liesel Van Helsing

Liesel Van Helsing is not a widely-known character, she’s a comic heroine who fights monsters (like her father, the original Van Helsing) and basically kicks ass and takes names. I came across her in a Humble Bundle of digital comics (delivered as .pdf files) and I recently dived back into the digital stack to have fun. I had forgotten how much I like the world of Liesel Van Helsing, despite the obviously ‘male-gazey’ designs of the female characters (at least there’s a lot of them). Here are a few reasons why I like her and her world so much.

The comics come with a lot of characters, recurring as well as non-recurring. There are villains (like Dracula himself) who make an appearance more than once, but it’s mostly Liesel’s friends who are around regularly, helping her fight or being drawn into a situation and making the best of it.
The design of the female characters, as mentioned above, seems to be more for the male gaze than for the female one, but that is pretty much a given for comic books. Yet, despite tight-fitting clothes and skin showing where a fighter should not show skin (like the midriff), the characters are well-written and have depth. They have their own problems, they have their own dreams, they have their own goals. Sometimes, those goals align when they work together, sometimes they don’t — just as in real life.
It’s also not that Liesel can’t fight on her own — she very much can —, but that many of the enemies she is facing as bosses in the stories simply are too powerful to be taken down by one more or less normal person (all characters, including Liesel, show some superhuman or supernatural tendencies, but then, that goes for the villains as well).

I do enjoy the way they work with each other, too. They support each other, they’re not trying to prove they’re better, stronger, or faster than the other one. It’s all about the monsters, about getting them down. It’s not about who kills more vampires, it’s about getting all those vampires killed. It’s a group effort and nobody tries to use it to make themselves look better than the rest.
The characters have different strengths, too. Some are physically strong, sometimes to a point where it’s not realistic, but this is a comic series about vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures. It’s not unrealistic in this context for a descendant of Henry Jekyll to morph into a super-strong and super-ripped self at times. Some are excellent shots and agile to boot, taking out enemies long-range while they’re avoiding being hit. Some have strong magic at their disposal (or they are part demons themselves). Some are mentally strong and can go on despite all the things which have happened to them. They all make do.
By supporting each other — even if, as in two of the story-lines, the original meeting wasn’t very positive —, they manage to take down enemies who are by far too strong for one fighter alone.
There are male characters, but they aren’t put up as the ultimate saviours (even though Hades, for instance, ought to be extremely powerful). They might fight alongside the women, but they never take the central role and push Liesel or other female characters out of the limelight.

The stories include a lot of different enemies, too, not all of which need the same kind of treatment. We have Dracula and his daughter (who is Liesel’s half sister), of course, because whom else would we have as the nemesis for a character named ‘Van Helsing?’
We have Frankenstein’s creature. We have werewolves. We have different kinds of vampires (because Dracula is not the only bloodsucker and not all vampires must be his offspring). We have undead beings with great power (such as a proper Egyptian Queen Reborn — take that, “The Mummy 2018”). We have low-class demons. We have creatures from all over the world, as Liesel lives in the early twenty-first century and can just hop into a plane.
The villains are well-balanced between being powerful (as they ought to be) and still having a weakness that can be exploited by Liesel and her friends in the end. They make the heroes work, which is always good, and they have the upper hand for quite some of the story. Especially Dracula’s daughter proves herself to be a dangerous adversary (perhaps more so than Dracula himself who seems to underestimate Liesel a lot despite prior encounters). All in all, the villains are very satisfying in the stories, because a story with a weak villain is no fun, especially in a comic book.

The graphic design of the series is very much early twenty-first century, which means a gorgeous use of colours and details, a free use of panels, and great inking. Sometimes I would wish for the female characters to be drawn with less revealing clothes, but that, too, was normal at the time and I can’t fault the artist for going with the flow there. At least Liesel, Robyn, and all the others look gorgeous, strong, and confident, so there’s that.
The storytelling is good as well. Sometimes, comics give the impression of hurrying over some aspects which are hard to put into a picture, but the artists do a good job with portraying the inner workings of their characters through facial expressions and the occasional thought bubble or suchlike. Sure, Liesel and the others don’t get that much of a character arc in most stories, but that isn’t necessary — it’s a comic book, not a novel focused on personal development. Comics are about action first and character development twenty-second or so.

If you come across the comics somewhere, like in another Humble Bundle (they’re doing very nice comic bundles — I’ve bought several from them), you might want to give them a closer look. I know that I’ve been entertained by them the first time I read them and I have been entertained by them when I reread them recently, too. They’re fun to read, have gorgeous artwork, and women working together instead of trying to out-do each other for the sake of a guy is always a good thing to see.