Batrisha the Vampire Girl – Ze Collected Comics Vol 1

Meet Batrisha Belfry, as she begins her stay in the drab outer suburb of Dullview, Australia. Placed there as part of the International Vampire Exchange Student Program, Batrisha has been tasked to discretely sire more vampires while staying with her incredibly naive host family, the Paynes. The only problem is, Batrisha is just not that into it and prefers to nourish herself on the pulsing Bloodberries harvested from the Plasma Plant growing in the cave she dug under the house.

This comic introduces her emo friends Lili and Shanon, ‘frenemies’ Mindy, Cindy and Lindy, The Creepy Caretaker, her vampire-hunter ‘brother’ Damien, The Vampire Tooth Fairy and other colourful characters.

In creating the comic, I ignored most of the standard vampire lore (because I wanted her at school in the daytime) and looked up the more weird, obscure stuff to make it more fun. As result, Batrisha is foiled by running water, lines of salt and frozen garlic breadsticks. She is burnt in the swimming pool after a nun paddles her feet in it, etc. Batrisha kills any plants she touches and leaves a burnt trail through the grass where she walks resulting in Dullview covered in a web of brown Nazca lines, much to the annoyance of the residents.

Batrisha the Vampire Girl won the Gold Ledger (now ‘Comic Arts Award of Australia’) for Australian Comic Strip of the Year in 2005, was published as a set of coffin-shaped graphic novellas, a short-lived branded t-shirts in Target and translated into a number of languages over its 17 year run. This is the first in a projected set of six volumes that will collect it all the first time.