My Rating
“He Fears The Cross!”
April 30th – 1941, the night finds Professor Cuza hunched over his makeshift desk. The arcane books the Nazis had given him to decipher reveal more secrets than he first expected. Original Arabic was still the Professor deficiency but Major Kaempffer was blind to that fact, for now.
As Theodore Cuza turned the page in the Pnakotic Manuscripts sprawled out before him, the lights strung up by the German engineers began to flutter. With a pop, the bulbs simultaneously burned out. The professor turned his wheelchair towards the dark corner near the window; the moonlight was the only light source now. A dark figure in some antiquated robes stared at him with yellowish eyes.
Hours later – outside the Keep near the base of the southern tower, Magda Cuza makes her way to a secret entrance revealed to her by Lului the Innkeeper. Magda was forced to vacate the Keep earlier that day because the German guards almost sexually assaulted her twice. Captain Woermann ordered the woman to room at the Inn until further notice. Now Magda had a message she desperately needed to get her father. The message was given to her by a stranger who entered the village earlier that afternoon.
Will Professor Cuza survive his first encounter with the mysterious entity terrorizing the Keep? Are the scripts devoted to the undead Moroi the basis for the Vlad Tepes legend? Is an enemy of an enemy a friend? Collect the series to find out!
Reviewer Notes
I have to report that issue number three gives us a better explanation of what haunts the walls inside the Keep. The movie really missed the mark now that I’ve read this version of F. Paul Wilson’s work. I still enjoy the movie, but it is just another example of how movie producers and directors can run wild with a writer’s original vision.
Mathew Dow Smith does an okay job with the art, but the tyranny of the Nazi soldiers really gets washed out by this style of cartooning. I stated in a past review that, in my opinion, IDW should have gone with a full color comic. I believe it would have brought more detail and clarity to the events. For now I’m sticking with the four star review. The story more than makes up for the deficiencies in production.
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