One of Gen U Tech’s experiments is on the loose, but she’s no Frankenstein’s Monster. She’s worse. The trio can’t control themselves around her, and she can’t control herself around Broadway. Meanwhile, Dr. Phobos completes a prototype of the Medusa device for Xanatos.
Miss last week’s? Read Rude Awakening review.
Gargoyles Clan-Building: Issue 4: “Blood from a Stone”
Reason(s) for existence: Disney wanted to make more money.
Main antagonist(s): Phobos, Xanatos, Lavonne
Time(s): Between Long Way To Morning and Reawakening
Location(s): NYC, NY, USA
Today’s issue is called Blood from a Stone. We’ve got a rather odd cover, with the trio and a vampire-looking chick. Everyone’s eyes are glowing or plain yellow. Lexington and Brooklyn look quite malevolent.
Down at the Sacrilege Club, where Price and his girlfriend met their unenviable ends, Beth is having a run-in with a gang. Looks like the same gang that was in Awakening. They have the distinction of being the first humans in the 20th century that Goliath threw around.
Above them, a woman in silhouette is draining the blood of someone. We get a narration from an unknown individual; it’s in the green boxes as opposed to Elisa’s yellow. They’re not yelling randomly like she does, but they do wax poetic.
Beth stumbles into a dark alley, because she’s smart like that. Before the bad guys can get to her, Broadway plows in.
Beth has the sense to run. However, the chick who was draining the blood comes down to speak with Broadway. She’s got wings like a gargoyle. Broadway is of course taken by this vixen. She says she’s not a gargoyle, but she’s like one. She’s hot, so he doesn’t bother to ask more about this intriguing piece of information.
They go to White Castle and have hamburgers. Not sure how you order hamburgers when you’re a gargoyle.
Wait, Broadway sort of explains it! He says people just hand him food. Now, I don’t think that’s going to last for very long. Enough people in the restaurant business start seeing gargoyles demanding food from them, they’re going to start talking. That’s something that’s hard to keep secret. Besides, this is 1995. In New York City. At least a few people have security cameras.
The gargoyle chick, whose name is Lavonne, has a dizzy spell. Broadway saves her. They decide to get together the next night.
Elisa is investigating the death of the guy that had his blood drained by Lavonne. It looks like he died falling out of a second-story window. Or rather, being thrown through it. He had vertigo, which the cops somehow know about. So it seems somewhat legit. But…he doesn’t have any blood.
The cops know this guy is a “small-time hood with Xanatos connections.” Let me stop you right there. You don’t get to be a billionaire with a multinational corporation by being an idiot. Being a billionaire doesn’t just happen. It takes a lot of savvy, intelligence, and skill. Why would any Xanatos Enterprise subsidiary openly work with a criminal? No, Xanatos would leave no fingerprints. If he contracted with criminals, he would work with a high level one, like Dracon, who could then order his minions to work on Xanatos’s projects. This way, Xanatos wouldn’t be linked. Dracon certainly wouldn’t want to give up Xanatos’s business, either.
But anyway, it works for the story, because Lavonne is getting revenge by killing him. See, she was Price’s girlfriend. The one that Phobos used as a test subject.
We get the entire story, which reads like a comic book should, complete with radiation from supposedly “deadly Thana rays.” I don’t know how they’re considered deadly, when she didn’t die. And also, if they’re known to be deadly, why hit someone with them?
Of course there is the requisite “battery of cruel tests and preparations,” the injecting of the “foul formula.”
Back at Elisa’s house, Elisa and Beth have an argument. It doesn’t make any sense: First Beth wants Elisa to have warned her about Sacrilege, then she gets pissed off when Elisa says she tried to.
Later, Mrs. Claus takes matters into her own hands.
No, wait, that’s a Elisa’s driving a white car and wearing a red jacket that has white fur on the lapels and sleeves. She’s tracking Glasses. Before she can get too far, Lavonne swoops in. She wants to kill Elisa and Glasses, since Glasses was behind getting kidnapped and Elisa was behind not getting found.
Goliath shows up. Lavonne flies away. He manages to get a confession out of Glasses, though. He spills the entire can of beans. He even implicates Xanatos.
Back at the clock tower, Lexington and Brooklyn are making fun of Broadway, who’s getting ready for his date.
Hudson warns him about this new female, since they don’t know anything about her.
Later he sees on the news a report of a winged bloodsucker.
In the Eyrie Building, Xanatos is catching up on the local fake news.
Xanatos is pissed off at Dr Phobos for letting the vampire chick escape. He wants the Medusa device done – he wants it done yesterday.
Dr Phobos is pissed because Xanatos actually wants real work done. But he’s got a back-up plan in the form of some poor woman he’s experimenting on.
Broadway introduces Lavonne to the rest of the Clan, sans Goliath. Then the trio heads off for the night.
They startle some vandals, then end up saving one as he falls off a bridge. Rather, the Trio’s fighting, and Lavonne has to save him. But while she does, she really gets a thirstin’ for his blood.
The boys are so territorial that they actually start beating each other up. As Lexington and Brooklyn crash into a wall, Broadway and Lavonne fly off.
Brook and Lex comment to each other that they felt they couldn’t control themselves when they were in her presence. Pheromone, maybe?
In the Eyrie building, Xanatos is in bed. But there’s no rest for the handsome. We get a nice, somewhat overly shadowed shot of him shirtless. I could have done with better lighting and, well, more view.
Where was I? Oh, right, Dr Phobos says the Medusa device is ready for initial testing. He hasn’t said much about the gargoyle human tissue replication, though, which Xanatos finds fishy. Xanatos decides he’s going to have to visit the Gen U Tech secret lair personally. Because if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
He drifts off to sleep with visions of secret project dancing in his head.
Lavonne and Broadway are alone together. She can’t control herself. She lunges at his throat even as she begs him to stop her. She has enough time – while he’s trying to hold her off and while they’re somehow gliding / falling – to tell him that Gen U Tech changed her body and mind. Now all she wants to do is drink blood.
The point of her as a creation was to suck blood from gargoyles, then return with it to the Gen U Tech labs. Sort of like a lab draw. But I don’t know how this works, since any blood that went into her stomach would get denatured by her stomach enzymes and acid. Does she have a little holding pouch halfway to her stomach? Why not just use the robot mosquitoes like Demona and Thailog did to get DNA for Sevarius to make clones of the clan?
The sun’s coming up. As she tries to drink Broadway’s blood, he turns to stone. And she gets fried by the sun. I don’t know why she would get fried. Gargoyles don’t get fried by the sun, they just turn to stone. Human’s only get marginally fried. If she had been a ginger as a human, I might buy it, but she wasn’t. Yes, it fits the vampire theme, but I don’t see where it came from on the DNA and radiation level.
Well, it looks pretty anyway: They land in a bed of roses. She’s a skeleton in his stone grasp.
Final Thoughts
Really there wasn’t any other way to deal with her. She’d been warped so much that she had a genetic drive to go and suck gargoyle blood. She’ll also feed on human blood. I don’t know if this could have been mitigated. She could eat real food, but I don’t know if she derived nutrients from it. Most vampires can’t eat real food. Or so says legend. And anyway, it’s another reason to make us hate Dracon, Xanatos, and Phobos.
The whole dumb idea about her existing only to get a sample of blood from the Gargoyles also doesn’t make sense. I’m sure it would be easy enough to capture one, get a blood sample, then move on. All you have to do is make the bait appealing enough and they’ll be on it like hornets on Mountain Dew. It certainly doesn’t warrant making some sort of vampire creature. But this is comics, not the TV series. Nor is it the SLG comics. And this is yet another reason why we are glad Greg Weisman was the creator of Gargoyles. Imagine what a disaster the series would have turned into if someone with less vision wrote it!
Tune in Tuesday: We meet more beautiful predators of the female test subject persuasion.
Thoughts? Comment!