3 out of 5

Crimson Society got off to a good start as something of a wonked out monster mash-up – Vampires are society’s leaders, and maybe there are zombies and werewolves – and has an effective cold open of lead Jack laying waste to some foes – seemingly against his will – with some mutating cybernetic arm attachments; just campy and crazy enough – especially with Carlos Trigo’s cartoonish but expressive and purposeful art – to hook us without making us roll our eyes at another potential vampire bandwagon candidate.  The story rewinds;  Jack is going to subject himself to an experiment which he’s hoping is the cure to something, which is pacedly revealed as werewolfism, but instead finds himself the owner of these robo-arms, which hunt vamps even if he doesn’t want to.  It’s a nice balance of world-building and tropes, and seems like a manageable scope for a new team.  But… the tendency to keep adding elements is there, and things soon start to spread out too far.  The scientist who created the arms is one tangled thread; his underling another; the political world of the vamps another.  And when Jack’s girlfriend gets tossed into the fray, though her role could be valuable, her dialogue seems too paper-thin to be anything except for exposition padding or, at worst, a reason why Jack might have to thrust himself into further danger.

‘Crimson Society’ definitely has a great premise worth exploring, and Trigo’s art and the wonderful pop colors of Andrea Celestini really sell the world as super-real, which is good for this kind of stuff.  But the tendency to over-stuff things from the get-go weighs the series down a bit, preventing those elements that felt more solid from building.