Blood Hunters #4 - Marvel Comics

BLOOD HUNTERS No. 4, January 2025

Considering that this comic contains a rather bizarre scene in which Elsa Bloodstone sends Spider-Man away for his own ‘safety’, rather than have him help the already under-powered titular characters battle against the formidably strong Bloodcoven, it is hard to imagine many “Children Of The Night” enjoying Erica Schultz’s plot for Issue Four of “Blood Hunters”. In fact, there’s arguably quite a bit about the American author’s twenty-page narrative which doesn’t appear to make all that much sense as a logical storyline; “You are a waste of Unusual’s time creature.”

For starters, if Miles Morales is so desperately struggling to fight off some sort of overwhelming desire to drink blood due to all his team-mates’ open wounds, why isn’t the gore having a similar impact upon all the other vampires surrounding him, such as the cat Moggy..? This quite stark inconsistency appears to have been penned solely to ensure that the all-female group can subsequently be bested by Bloodstorm One and his cronies, and a helpless Dagger be carried off to a disused warehouse by her enemies.

To make matters debatably even more contrived though, the only reason Spider-Man is able to depart is because Ulysses Bloodstone’s daughter suddenly stops wanting to kill the Brooklyn-born teenager “who was bitten by a Genetically Altered Spider”, and surprisingly, temporarily sates his unhealthy thirst via the power of her Bloodgem. Such a dramatic reversal of the quite disagreeable woman’s attitude seemingly comes completely out of the blue, and also begs the question why the additional time she has bought Morales couldn’t have been used by him to batter the likes of Damascene and Smoke Eater, rather than swing away like a coward in the night..?

Likewise, a number of other manufactured moments are needed to implausibly fall into place to allow the Blood Hunters to locate their fallen friend, Tandy Bowen. Foremost of these is the decision by Dracula’s clone to simply have the three women tied up on roof-top and instantly be set free straight after the villains have teleported away. Just where the motivation for this compassion comes from is a real head-scratcher, considering all of the antagonists are mass murderers with a taste for blood. However, without this act of unconvincing clemency, there wouldn’t be any likelihood of a third act in which White Widow handily reveals she knows Dagger’s location because she bugged Cloak’s former partner beforehand.

Writer: Erica Schultz, Pencilers: Robert Gill & Chris Campana, and Inkers: Robert Gill & Cam Smith