This was just as good as the first volume! The artwork is so detailed and beautifully done. I love that van Helsing is here now, I feel like we can get on with killing Dracula now that he's here. I can't wait to read the next volume!

The #DRCL midnight children manga series feels like a Gothic horror crossover between Bram Stoker's Dracula, common vampire tropes, and elite faux-British boarding schools. Volume one depicts the ship Demeter's final, tragic voyage to England, while volume two follows Count Dracula's insidious infiltration of the school and the student body (sometimes literally). The relationships of the students also grow more complicated, as Mina is not just the only female student, but also a maid working at the mostly boys' school; Quincey and Arthur become love (lust?) rivals and fight for sickly Luke's affections; and Luke himself continues to be a mysterious, androgynous character, shifting between androgynously male "Luke" and ethereally beautiful "Lucy" as day becomes night. A new character is also introduced in this volume--Van Helsing, here a professor and the students' guide to vanquishing the vampire terrorizing them.

The art of the manga is detailed, disturbing, strange, and beautiful. Some of the horror elements are reminiscent of Junji Ito, while the gothic, pseudo-British style recalls Kaori Yuki. Dracula himself is rendered variously as a graceful (if creepy) shadow ballerino and a demonic dragon, while Luke, in his possessed state, becomes horrifyingly gaunt and skeletal. Dance continues to be a motif in the series, though what it references is still unconfirmed. Questions also remain regarding Luke/Lucy--Mina uses "Lucy" while the boys use "Luke", and each uses respective binary pronouns (at least in the English translation); it is unclear whether Luke/Lucy identifies as nonbinary and why the character undergoes this transformation. I suspect it is a reference to Dracula's companions in his Transylvanian castle, but would be interested to hear other interpretations.

Content warning: There is depiction of sexual conduct involving students, either to express their own secret emotions or as a metaphor for the aphrodisiac effect of a vampire thrall. Some may find these scenes gratuitous. This series is definitely a story for mature audiences.

I cannot begin to describe how excited I was to find out that I had been approved for the second volume of #DRCL Midnight Children. The first volume was such a beautiful work with art that I could talk about for days on end and an interesting take on the Dracula story that included new twists on the familiar characters.

This second volume picks up pretty closely after the first left off with Luke left changed by their encounter with Dracula and their friends trying to figure out what they witnessed that dark night. A new character arrives in this volume in the form of none other than Van Helsing himself, and I must say, I thoroughly enjoy the way his character is handled so far. There is something really fun about an overly dramatic sort of character and that is what this Van Helsing is. He speaks in almost old English and there are multiple panels where his backdrop is simply the typed words I AM VAN HELSING while he poses in the foreground. I can’t help but imagine him exclaiming this out loud every time I see it looming behind him.

“I AM VAN HELSING!”

Although I do kind of have a weird vibe with him hanging out with all of these kids. That’s one issue I think with having the main characters being so young. Some of the interactions with the characters that are adults read kind of bad vibe-y, but maybe that is the point.

ART GUSHING BEGINS HERE.

I know that I spent a huge paragraph last time gushing about the brilliance and beauty of the art, but I would like to do so again very quickly. I feel like the art of graphic novels is just as important if not more so than the story, plot, dialogue, etc. Something that I am very quickly coming to love about this series is its handling of Dracula himself. The way he is drawn always in the shadows, almost always lingering in some form around the characters even if he is not readily apparent. There is one particular panel where one of the characters is walking down the hallway and you can see a sliver of a shadow cast behind them that morphs as it fades to the opposite side of the panel behind them, and it is a gorgeous, creepy little moment. It is the detailed touches like this that really bring a dark, foreboding, and otherworldly feel to the story. Dracula is at times drawn in abstractions, almost eldritch in nature, and it really helps to make him more frightening.

The sequence of Dracula interacting with Mina is my favorite scene of this volume. I love the dream-like quality, the otherworldliness, and the symbolism. Absolutely gorgeous.

ART GUSHING ENDS HERE.

I think my only tiny nitpick for this volume is that one of the transitions was so seamless from one thing to another that I was a bit confused on what was happening. I had to go back a few pages and read again to realize it was a different character and a different scene.

Thanks to Netgalley and VIZ Media SO SO MUCH for giving me the chance to continue on this dark and dazzling journey as a digital ARC for my review. All of my opinions are my honest ones.

Reading the ARC of this was difficult and frustrating at times; I'm not entirely sure why VIZ goes to such lengths to up the contrast on the pages so high that even the double-spread pages (easily the best part about the first volume) are nearly indecipherable. Still, that's not the fault of the book itself, and the art I could see was typically gorgeous. I'm really enjoying the narrative developments we're seeing and I'm keenly invested in Luke/Lucy, Mina and now Van Helsing.

This series continues to be a fun reinterpretation of Dracula. I like that this version shows us Lucy's various relationships with her friends and I love how much of the uneasy weirdness of the novel remains either untouched or elaborated on. (The Zoo incident, the blood transfusion, ecxt.) A notable addition to this volume is that of professor Van Helsing, who actual acts as such to these children! Neat! The Count himself seems about to take the stage, too! I'm very interested in what will be done with him here.

Thanks to NetGalley and Viz Media for my copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

The same issues I had with Volume 1, I have with this one. Except now, the art is somehow MORE blurry and faint. What the heck. I read this on my NetGalley app on my 12.9 inch iPad so I do not know why it's so blurry and faint. The only consistently visual image is the damn Viz Media watermark.

The storytelling has also gotten worse.

Definitely won't be keeping up with this one, especially because I heard it's only 1/3 of the way through in the original edition.

No thanks.