"Night Cage: Volume 1" Comic Review

Ravenwood Prison was already dangerous enough with angry guards and fierce inmates. Throw a vampire into the mix and you've got quite a party. Night Cage takes us into the depths of this correctional facility as a new inmate creates a feeding frenzy.

Night Cage leans heavily into exploitation territory. The women are little more than eye candy, often scantily clad or completely nude. Artist Vincenzo Pietropaulo gets creative with some of the shots to keep things PG-13, but it's pretty close to that line. It's explicit without actually showing anything.

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The story often focuses more on these pin-up style images than the actual events in the prison. This is unfortunate, as there's a pretty interesting premise here. This could be like a vampire version of Welcome to Hoxford, but it's more like an extra violent episode of Orange is the New Black.

The characters mostly fill stereotypical roles. There's the innocent southern girl; the slut; the tough Black girl; and the holy-rolling Latina to name a few. We've seen iterations of these before and none of them are developed all that much for us to care about their lives. Certain key elements are shoehorned in to play a part later, such as the Latina's concern for her cross, which serves as a deterrent against the vampire.

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The vampire's attacks get bigger and bolder as time goes on. She turns a few inmates and the place is quickly overrun. Pietropaulo's line work is superb and super clean, showing the claws and teeth of the vampires in horrifying fashion. Letterer Salvatore Di Marco hits with some great sound effect work in these segments. Just in case you wondered what it sounds like when you plunge a hand through a man's chest, it's “Shloop.”

Night Cage ends right when things really get going. This is volume one, so there's more of this coming, however I wonder if writer C. Michael Forsyth couldn't have cut down on some of the gratuitous scenes in favor of some further movement in the plot. As it stands, the book leaves you hanging, but you get plenty of half-naked women fighting half-naked vampires.