Hellsing

The Hellsing Organisation, a Protestant body answering to the British crown, exists to destroy vampires and other supernatural threats. Its principal weapon is Alucard, a vampire bound to its service.

When a surviving Nazi battalion of artificial vampires attacks London, the series becomes an extended military engagement between three factions.

A vampire employed by the Crown, a Catholic assassin, and a Nazi battalion attacking London.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The series is deliberately, comprehensively over the top: enormous weapons, operatic dialogue, extreme gore and characters who monologue at length about their own magnificence.

The commitment to this is total and is the point. There is no restraint anywhere in it and no attempt at any.

He is effectively invincible, enjoys violence, and is interesting chiefly because the series is candid that he is not a hero in any sense.

His relationship with his employers is the most genuinely strange thing in the work: a monster kept on a leash by people who are entirely aware of what he is.

Hirano's drawing is heavy, high-contrast and deliberately cluttered, with extreme foreshortening and an obvious pleasure in military hardware.

It is not elegant and is extremely effective for the material. The action is frequently difficult to follow and is clearly intended to overwhelm rather than to be read carefully.

The police officer turned vampire against her will is the series' only character with any interiority, and her reluctance supplies its one sustained emotional thread.

Her arc toward accepting what she has become is conventional and is handled better than the surrounding material would suggest.

The antagonists are an unreconstructed Nazi remnant led by a major who states plainly that he wants war for its own sake.

The series does not attempt historical seriousness and uses the iconography for spectacle, which readers will find either acceptable within the register or genuinely objectionable.

The Catholic paladin who opposes Alucard is the series' best creation: fanatical, genuinely faithful, and the only character who has something at stake.

His confrontations with Alucard are the work's high points and carry a theological weight nothing else in it attempts. His final confrontation with Alucard raises a genuine question about what it costs to defeat a monster, and it is the only moment in the series with real weight.

The Protestant-Catholic antagonism is played for conflict rather than examined, with both organisations presented as violent institutions that loathe each other.

There is a genuine idea underneath about faith and monstrosity, and it surfaces mainly in the Anderson material. Hirano is not interested in theology as such, and readers hoping for a serious treatment of the conflict he is using for spectacle will not find one.

Ten volumes, complete, with a long middle engagement and a conclusion that resolves the central relationships.

The pacing is uneven and the series spends a great deal of time on battles that could be shorter, but it does end properly. The final volumes in particular tie off the relationship between Alucard and the Hellsing family, which turns out to have been the series' actual subject all along.

It ran across a decade with substantial gaps, and the drawing changes noticeably between early and late volumes.

Hirano's style becomes denser and more confident as it proceeds, and the final volumes are considerably better drawn than the first. The schedule was irregular enough that readers following it at the time waited years between volumes, and the pacing reflects a work assembled over a long period.

An early television series diverges substantially from the manga, and a later original video series adapts it faithfully and is generally preferred.

Readers should be aware that the two adaptations are very different works, and that only the later one follows this story. The later version also adapts the material's excess more faithfully than television standards would have permitted, which is why it is the one readers are pointed to.

Readers who want spectacle without restraint and are entertained rather than exhausted by sustained excess.

It is not a subtle work and does not pretend otherwise. Readers looking for character or argument should choose almost anything else in this section. It is also short enough at ten volumes to be finished quickly, which matters for a work whose appeal depends entirely on sustained intensity.