Awesome story with impressive pictures.
I've heard of the games but never played them before. This comic was a great way to get into the story and I can't wait to get more of it.

I was granted eARC access to Vampire: The Masquerade Volume 1 by the publisher via NetGalley. Thank you for the opportunity! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

I was introduced to the World of Darkness properties in my late teens and have played several of them both tabletop and LARP style, but V:TM is the one I'm most familiar with, owing to the fact that my college boyfriend was the local LARP group's storyteller. I've both played genuinely and served as an NPC many times. I've only just started to embrace graphic novels and I was so excited to see a V:TM offering available that I snapped it up and immediately started reading.

The art style is dark, gritty, and beautiful. It's reminiscent of the player manuals, but also has that 80s and 90s Buffy, Lost Boys feel. This is the version of vampires I default to when asked to think of vampires. Bravo to the artist(s), very well done!

I do appreciate the fact that this novel remains true to its source material to the extent that the leader is the Prince even if she's a woman, and every vampire who's every created another is a sire, even if they're women. Vampires don't care about gender enough to have gendered labels. Part of me has always wanted the terms princess and dam to be used and just given equal power, but this simplified way of doing things also emphasizes how old vampire society is. A princess does not outrank a prince, so the leader must be titled prince. Simple.

I do wish this read more like LitRPG with characters levelling up and gaining new skills and abilities as the story progressed. This is built on the lore of an RPG property and we have a brand new vampire learning the ropes. It would have been so easy to do! Aside from that, the story is well thought out and does feel like it could have been a possible play-through of some storyteller's plan, but I wish it had been presented in a more linear fashion. A lot of people get staked and then show up again a few pages later, and I was left unsure which ones weren't staked correctly and which ones were only "alive again" because of timeline jumping.

I love the fact that not all of the vampires are purely former humans. A lot of times people playing WoD properties forget that you can mix and match a bit, and that it's absolutely possible to turn something else into a vampire. It's great to see weres and other creatures, and I love how much fun was had with Mitch's forms. (How perfect that he sleeps in dog form!) I also loved the fact that the artwork turned all of the blood on the page into its own character. It moves, it dances. When vampires use it, it's magic. These illustrations actually show that.

Overall this is darkly beautiful and a great start to an interesting storyline. Despite my wishes for what I thought was lacking, I do intend to read on when future volumes come out, and I'd also love to read graphic novels from other WoD properties. (Changeling, perhaps?) I recommend this to all gritty vampires lovers and to all fans new and old of WoD and similar RPG systems. In fact, I'm going to tell that old college boyfriend who used to run the local V:TM LARP about it next time we chat!

I love Tim Seeley! Always, and especially his vampire comics. The artwork for this was beautiful, and so enjoyable. I think I was at a bit of a loss regarding the story because I wasn't sure what to expect going into the comic, but it was enjoyable if a bit confusing for me personally.

This wasn't what I expected at all..... I really did not enjoy the art style, I felt like parts were extremely gratuitous and there truly was no substance. I don't understand the appeal and am disappointed.

Vampire: The Masquerade was a more formative influence on me than I'm entirely comfortable admitting, right down to the fact that it has coloured my phrasing when I say that I haven't played the game this millennium. Not only that; although, as with so many games, I have enormous bundles of the PDFs, I haven't even read them much* – possibly because it is so firmly linked in my mind with that awkward transitional phase of youth. But when I saw a tie-in comic pop up on Netgalley; and that it was written by Tim Seeley, who has promising past form with the undead in Revival; and that the covers were by Aaron Campbell and David Mack, both of them perfect matches for that old White Wolf aesthetic...well, I could hardly resist. Alas, the first stumbling block was that Devmalya Pramanik's interior art was not on the same level; it gets the scratchy nocturnal feel of the world down, but the characters' anatomies and likenesses are inconsistent to the extent that I'm not even sure how old some of the key players are meant to look (something that is important to the story, when you have a vampire lead still interacting with her mortal family). Nor is it exactly letting down top-notch writing. The setting is the Twin Cities, which obviously fired me off on a whole mental tangent of Hold Steady songs reworked to be about vampires**, and it's explained in a very 'As you know, Vlad' page of exposition that after a long time with the two cities run by one vampire Prince, there's now a movement to split. Our lead, an enforcer whose Brujah tendencies extend only as far as not wanting an official title, is meant to help stop that from happening. Oh, and also the vampire civil war is over and there's a Second Inquisition which somehow involves the CIA but this is a bother rather than a crisis? I don't know, maybe this is all part of the standard setting now, the only changes I was really aware of were the ones where they made three of the clans less spectacularly racist***. But judging from the RPG material giving stats &c for the characters which is included as backmatter (a nice touch, that), even some of the basic attributes have changed, never mind the format for NPC descriptions. That said, one of them does describe a character as "a dilatant poseur" and, while I am intrigued by the notion that vampires, like cats, are non-Newtonian fluids, I'm 99% sure they mean 'dilettante', so maybe it's just shoddy editing. Anyway, I digress. The story is trying to be an Ellroy-style murder mystery which leads into a conspiracy thriller, and it makes some interesting choices (including antagonists who are not the obvious choice to an extent they seems a weird place to start and could almost be considered cheating), but for me it never rose past readability to ever grip per se.

Tini Howard (some of whose other stuff I've enjoyed) collaborates with Blake Howard on a back-up strip about anarchs, illustrated by Nathan Gooden, and set near enough that we can assume the two will dovetail at some point, as they duly do. This gets points for the deeply 2020s line "I'd always heard 'Life sucks, and then you die.' But the truth is, you die, and it just gets worse." Beyond which, it's just sort of there, really, contributing to the mood but with even less urgency than the main story.

*RPG stuff I have been reading lately includes doomy supplements to the last wave of Warhammer 40K roleplaying, which scratch my itch for that world and its gothic strangeness in a way the core game's increasingly silly attempts to flog plastic no longer can; Troika, essentially Fighting Fantasy as reworked by surrealists; and the new edition of Torg, a game I always used to covet but have never previously read, which in some ways shares a kitchen sink aesthetic with Rifts but seems to execute it all so much more elegantly.
**They'd do it as the Hold Undeady, obviously. The album is called Almost Killed Me (But Then Brought Me Back). The main track in my head is Your Little Gangrel Friend, but with something like How a Resurrection Really Feels you don't even need to change it.
***Between this and the current Whedon shitstorm, nineties vampires seem to be the new seventies pop when it comes to a sea of awful on which floats the plaintive excuse 'You have to remember, it was a very different time'.

I thoroughly enjoyed this!
This adds new elements, species & realism to the world of vampires. The fact that there are different types of vampires and hunters is the real uniqueness, I usually read about on or two types of vampires, but this took influences from many cultures and added them into this story. The political and government was also s interesting. Can't wait to continue this!

The sort of excellence I would expect from a creative team like this. Good strong story of intrigue and betrayal, leaving me wanting more. Great introduction to the Vampire: the Masquerade game world too. The rules at the end of the volume are greatly appreciated.

NetGalley ARC Educator 550974

The graphics, the story lines, the novel of the year. This novel is amaze balls. I felt like I was watching an animated movie. Full of action, angst, mystery and women taking charge. Loved it. Looking forward to more volumes.

To be honest, I asked to review this graphc novel because I love vampires ad the entire 'Realm' they come from and in that aspect, I loved the book. However there were a few times when things just didnt add up or the story skipped too much for me to make sence. I love the storyline between all characters and the few twists and turns added in. I did however think the book would finish at one stage (it made a clean break to end the story), however it carried on. I loved the art style and it worked well with the vampire theme.

A standard story of a vampire looking after a newly-turned vampire, flooded with lingo to show it's not a phone-in job, but in fact tied to some game I'd never heard of. Oh, and it's interrupted by a different story set in the same Twin Cities area, of a bunch of the undead including a werewolf, on a road trip to do something or other that goes wrong. There is nothing here to lift this from the average, meaning it's for genre completists only. It's better than many a game tie-in book, but Patricia Briggs it ain't.

The cover art on this one was amazing and it was the first reason for my picking this book.

The story of Vampire: The Masquerade was dark and somewhat capturing, but not my thing to the fullest. It was also hard to follow at times and I didn't get the back story completely. It was a bit jumbled for my taste.

The art, though, is amazing and I loved every dark detail of it.

A gory but intriguing vampire story with lots of politics, schemes, twists and turns. The art work is good but the story is hard to follow in some places. There is quite a bit of back story which is revealed as the comic progresses. It is certainly interesting but not one for me.

Copy provided via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

An absorbing tale for long-time fans of the World of Darkness or people new to it. If you're not familiar with the WoD, you get thrown in just like a newly-embraced vampire. Plenty of action, interesting motivations, and vampire politics seen from an interesting POV. It's not all fancy gatherings and high-level manipulation of mortals.

There are two stories. One is of the Prince's "dirty book" Cecily Bain--a former Anarch who does the dirty work of the Camarilla-aligned Prince and Primogen. Cecily is complicated--connected to her human life but with no illusions about being a monster, cold-blooded but with a soft spot, singing one moment and voicing her monster the next. The other story is of a group of vampires not aligned with any faction and doing their best to survive.

The stories show a variety of types of vampires and ways/reasons they were made. They're interesting for me as a fan but also a good example of how varied vampires are. I want to know more about many of the characters and I'm invested in what happens next in the Twin Cities.

The cover is what drew me into reading this one.

The art for the covers really is gorgeous and the art inside is just as nice. The story....left much to be desired. Like I know what Vampire: the Masquerade is. I was a huge fan of the PC game back in the day and love all things vampires. This just...wasn't all that engaging for me.

Cecily Bain, the enforcer with a heart of gold was just a little boring.

I actually liked Alejandra more than her but still it just didn't do it for me. I wanted it to because I'm a huge fan of Tim Seeley as a writer. Maybe it's just been too long since I was into the Vampire: The Masquerade and it's always been a little boring in between the blood and maiming.

Two stars for the art alone. Just really gorgeous stuff.

Thank you to NetGalley for letting me read this in exchange for an honest review. .

I recommend everyone to get some basic knowledge about the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade, although some things are explained. I love that there is more content being released, as I have been a fan of WoD since my early teens.
I really liked the story, and the art direction certainly works well. I look forward to Vol. 2!

A interesting comic book based on the role playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade. The story follows Cecily Bain, an enforcer for the vampire elite who encounters a new vampire and decides to take her under her wing. Thus ensues a dangerous conspiracy and so much more. There are a lot of storylines and characters and the overall story is really interesting! The artwork is spectacular!!

*Thanks Netgalley and Diamond Book Distributors for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*