Bloodstone by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Michael Lopez, Scott Hanna, et al.

from Bloodstone #1

In 2001, twenty-five years after Ulysses Bloodstone was killed off, Marvel brought him back... sort of. Bloodstone was a four-issue miniseries focused on the daughter who never knew her father. Eighteen-year-old Elsa and her mother move to Massachusetts, having inherited a mansion from Elsa's father; down on their luck, they have no other financial resources. Elsa's mother doesn't want her to know her heritage... but of course she soon stumbles on it and ends up taking her father's monster-fighting mantle.

As I said in my previous post (see item #1 in the list below), Bloodstone ends up retooled a bit here. Elsa inherits a piece of his bloodstone gem in the form of a choker, but other than that, there's no substantive connections to his original 1970s appearances, no mentions of the conspiracy he battled or the gem's importance to his quest to defeat monsters. Instead, he's a more generic monster hunter, battling the kind of creatures that might appear in a Universal monsters film, like Dracula or armies of mummies. He has a Frankensteinesque manservant and a vampire legal executor, and the ability to teleport around the world to deal with monsters.

from Bloodstone #4

So this all is what Elsa inherits, accidentally teleporting into danger and figuring a way out of it with the help of the manservant (Adam) and a nerdy teenage boy who has a thing for her. The result is pretty fun, actually. This is nothing deep, but if you don't want to read about a sarcastic teenage girl mocking an undead warlord trying to raise an army of mummies in Egypt... why are you even here? This is pure comics.

The art is occasionally a bit skeevy, and sometimes a little confusing, but it's exactly the kind of art the story calls for, I think. Notoriously, this story was recently revealed to be rewritten by Gail Simone in one of her earliest comic assignments; my understanding is that she punched up the dialogue (to make it more Buffyesque) after the comic was written. I think you can see the signs of this if you know; Joss Whedon talks about how he was once hired to punch up the dialogue on an already recorded film. This meant everything he added had to be done via ADR, and thus the characters became wittier when they were offscreen and he didn't have to match mouth movements. Similarly, here there's a lot of jokes that come from off-panel and aren't totally reflected by the visuals, tonally. Still, if you hadn't told me, I don't think I'd've noticed, it all works together fairly well.

from Bloodstone #2

Bloodstone has never been collected, though Marvel has twice solicited printings of Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters claiming it will be included. When I first conceived of this project reading through Marvel's Bloodstone stuff, the four issues could be found fairly cheaply on the secondary market, but since then 1) the Gail Simone reveal came out, and 2) Elsa Bloodstone appeared in a MCU animated film on Disney Plus, so now people are more interested in the character, and the issues range from $30 to $150 apiece on MyComicShop.com. Thus, I had to settle for getting them on comiXology.

This iteration of Elsa Bloodstone made just one further appearance of sorts, in a handbook-style one-shot called Marvel Monsters. The book presents profiles of various Marvel monsters, from Bombu of Oobagon VIII and Devil Dinosaur to the Molten Man-Thing and Rorgg, in an in-universe style. It's made up of blog posts by Elsa and e-mails to and from her as she tries to assemble information on all sort of monsters from across Marvel continuity. Again, you can get it on comiXology. I found it hard to read every word—I just don't care about Marvel monsters that much—but I did find it occasionally interesting, and Elsa's voice gave it a lot of charm. There are a lot of goofy monsters in the Marvel universe!

Bloodstone was originally published in four issues (Dec. 2001–Mar. 2002). The story was written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning [with dialogue by Gail Simone], penciled by Michael Lopez (#1-4) and Tom Derenick (#4), inked by Scott Hanna, lettered by Jon Babcock, and edited by Mike Marts.

Marvel Monsters: From the Files of Ulysses Bloodstone and the Monster Hunters was originally published in one issue (Jan. 2006). The issue was written by coordinator Michael Hoskin, with Madison Carter, Jeff Christiansen, Sean McQuaid, Stuart Vandal, Eric Moreels, Ronald Byrd, and Barry Reese, and edited by Jeff Youngquist.

This is the second post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)