Best Known for the Fanservice: All know her iconic Stripperific red sling suit and that she's a vampire, but very few know anything about the setting or her backstory. (Or how selfsame costume stays put - a frequent cosplay problem...)
Broken Base: Vampirella's 2016 outfit has been called out by many fans for not being sexy enough while others point out a skintight roller derby outfit with a leather jacket is sexy by itself. Vampirella #0, released in 2017, has ditched the new outfit in favor of a modified version of her old one. It only sparingly appears in the 2019 run, being treated as a sort of alternative combat outfit by Vampirella, mostly using it while working as an operative for the Vatican.
Baron Gustav von Kreist, fascinated by the carnage he saw during World War I, made a Deal with the Devil in return for immortality, though he found his body began to decay as time went on. Giving his services to any vampire clan that would provide him with a fresh supply of victims, Von Kreist aided the vampires' efforts to reduce mankind to cattle. Taking the daughters of a Mafia boss hostage, Von Kreist forces him to choose which will live, only to shoot the one he chose; before ordering the survivor to kill her father, turning the dead sister into a vampire and killing said girl again when she shows hesitance to do harm to her living sister. Also a horrific Serial Killer and rapist, a victim of Von Kreist is found with her eyes and mouth stitched shut and her arms and legs stitched together. His long list of victims includes children, as he crashed a damaged plane into a playground and casually threw a little girl off a bridge. Believed to be destroyed, Von Kreist is later resurrected into the body of one of Vampirella's close friends by his own descendant, which he uses to attempt to kill his grandson and then offer the life of his new body to forge an alliance with Dracula. A normal human aside from his immortality, Von Kreist was a monster who walked the Earth in the skin of a man, spreading suffering wherever he went.
Vampirella/Witchblade: The Feast, written by Justin Gray: Rod Sterling is the unofficial head of the J. Holmes Modeling Agency, who discovered a Magical Camera which allowed him to steal the souls of innocent women to keep himself immortal and young. Having J. Holmes himself find and prepare the women for him by promising them a model career, Rod hires some people to track down the vampire for him and cut them apart, so he could make the "Eternal Slender" product from their meat and feed it to unsuspecting women, before he steals their souls and turn them into his undead slaves. Making a deal with other vampires, Rod feeds them his zombified models, so he could have them hunt down and harvested as well.
Elizabeth Báthory, when human, killed countless girls to bathe in their blood. After rising as a vampire, Báthory slaughters numerous innocents as "festivities", and when she meets Jack the Ripper, she kills his latest victim and makes him her pet. In modern day, Báthory allows Jack to function as a serial killer while bringing her young women. Turning others into vampires, Báthory kills her victims, attempting to force Vampirella and Barnabas Collins to kill one another before celebrating by trying to have her hostages torn apart for fun.
Jack the Ripper himself is a misogynist psychopath who slaughtered women in Whitechapel. Now serving Báthory, Jack brings her victims while operating as a Serial Killer through the ages. Garnering the name "The Big Apple Butcher" for his latest, Jack targets multiple innocents and relishes in their suffering, even trying to murder Vampirella and her friends to satisfy his lust for murder.
Continuity Lockout: Happened with the Brandon Jerwa run of Vampirella in Dynamite. Ben introduced many characters from the old Warren and Harris comics which Dynamite fans would not have been familiar with as well as a cosmic conflict between Order and Chaos that involves science fiction elements as well as time travel. This resulted in the Gainax Ending of the first Dynamite series and a complete continuity reboot.
Fridge Brilliance: The Gunduz Vol. 5 #7 cover shows Vampirella cards with "V" signs on it. Too bad the gag only works when you have seen a French deck, but not when you also know the "V" is not the queen but the knave("valet")...
Iron Woobie: Vampirella is definitely this in the 2010 series. Her lover Adam Van Helsing is dead. The world hates and fears her. The Catholic Church is an untrustworthy ally at best, always ready to betray her, and most of her human friends are dead. Oh and she lives in a Crapsack World full of evil. She also doesn't know which of her two contradictory backstories is true. The fact she continues to fight on against all odds makes her heroism all the more impressive.
Sofia Murray and Vampirella had quite a bit in the 2010 series. She had an asshole ex-boyfriend, but it's implied that she's bisexual. Nothing really happens between her and Vampi, but all the longing glances hint that it's more than just friendship.
This was pretty much the entire point of her crossover with Purgatori.
Virtually all of Vampirella's female foes tend to have this with her from the Queen of Hearts, Le Fanu to Slade.
For once this is no modern Harris invention. Warren sometimes played the trope too, e.g. with the Amazon Queen. It even has the local villain lampshading the event: "Great! Now I can kill her and her lesbian lover with just one bullet!" Which promptly gets him eaten by a giant snake, since the times were liberal then.
Narm: The character of Lukas Van Helsing who appears as Vampirella and Adam Van Helsing's adult son in Hell, the circumstances of his conception are never explained, and then he disappears without a trace. Made worse by the incredibly bizarre time travel shenanigans of that story arc.
No Yay: Dixie gets kissed by her vampirized sister for the depraved delight of the evil vampires around them.
The Warren times story "The Night Willa Jane Gornley Went Home" is one of nuclear dimensions. The protagonist is a horrible disfigured child. Even her step parents, who are really good people, hesitate to touch her. She fantasizes she's an alien left on the wrong planet. And then one night an UFO lands, and out steps a dude who for the first time takes her into his arms without hesitation. You guessed it, the dude is Death. Any resemblence to Andersens "Matchstick Girl" is purely coincidental.
The death of Dixie Fattoni. She is shot in the back by a Nazi and dies on Vampi's arms with her final words asking forgiveness for letting her down.
Theiss Titillation Theory: How she keeps that outfit on is a mystery. In fact, that was the biggest reason it was changed in the movie.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Vampirella went through a fair number of different redesigns, some practical like the 2010◊ and 2016◊ redesigns from Dynamite or others more spiker and edgier like a suit◊ she wore briefly during the 90s. Whatever the case, these outfits never last very long and always revert to the classic red bikini due to fan backlash. Although in the most recent case with the 2016 outfit, instead of going reversed it was changed to a slightly altered version for the following year's relaunch.
They Copied It, So It Sucks!: In addition to other complaints about the 2016 costume redesign was the complaint that it ripped off Claire Redfield's outfit◊ from Resident Evil 2, changing only the colors, the logo, and the boots.
Unnecessary Makeover: Harris Comics made her outfit progressively skimpier until its creator called it "Dental Floss." This despite she was already one of the most provocative, sensual, and flirtatious women in comics. The Broken Base example also shows some people think remaking her costume is problematic for the same reasons in reverse.
Values Dissonance: Vampirella's iconic bathing suit was created by feminist comic artist Trina Robbins as an example of open female sexuality and lack of shame. It has since been criticized by many feminists for being overly sexualized. And then when the bathing suit was brought back in 2017, writer Blake Northcott said her decision to do so was rebellion against shaming female sexuality. This is because of a Broken Base within feminism itself between sex-positive and sex-negative feminists that goes back decades.
Dixie Fattoni. She witness her father being forced by Von Kreist to chose between which daughter gets killed and he chooses Dixie instead of her sister Pixie, who gets promptly gunned down by Von Kreist because he wanted to make sure his surviving daughter knew her father condemned her to death. She gets kidnapped a lot, even molested by a vampirized Pixie and its revealed that in one Bad Future, she sees Earth being taken over by vampires. And she dies by the end of the Harris run.
The Biblical Cain turns out to be one too. After having killed his brother, he was cursed with not only immortality, but his children would also be forced to kill one and other - he'd have a pair of twins, one dark-haired and the other blonde, and the blondes would usually kill their siblings. He witnessed this many, many times over the ages and was forced to bury countless of his children.
Chelsea Cantrell from Kurt Busiek's run. She was a teenage girl who was kidnapped by Ethan Shroud to be his champion though he changed his mind and decided to use her as a sacrifice when Vampirella returned. He then turned her into a vampire and had her murder Adam van Helsing's father Conrad. Adam seemingly kills her but she survives and discovers she cannot be near her friends again due to her bloodlust.
Complete Monster: Vlad Dracula is a stark contrast to the otherwise peaceful vampires of the planet of Drakulon, devouring hundreds of innocents while massacring the council and its High Elder, Vampirella's father, when he's brought to trial. Escaping to Earth and mutating in the process, Vlad spreads his evil legacy over centuries with countless converted into his vampire lineage and the very myth of vampirism founded on his evil, responsible for numerous horrible deaths in the present day either to sate his bloodlust or in his feud with Operation PURGE. Vlad spitefully transformed the father of Adam Van Helsing into a vampire while forcing Adam to kill him, later trying to starve Vampirella to a point where she drains Adam after the two become partners and eventually espousing his intentions to bring the world under darkness and slaughter all humanity.
Narm: The 1996 movie is full of this. The vampire villains in particular just look and sound silly due to a combination of cheap make-up and bad acting when they're presumably supposed to be threatening.
Questionable Casting: Talisa Soto as Vampirella. Not that she isn't beautiful (stunningly so, in fact), she just didn't have the physique for the role. The director later said that he tried to get the buxom, statuesque Julie Strain, but was overruled. And in Soto's defense, the material she had to work with was pretty bad to begin with.
◊ and 2016
