Characters do not simply stand but vogue, strutting and striking wildly elaborate stances that defy anatomy and flashing flamboyant gestures as if they were posing for a magazine cover with such verve they break through panels and gutters for want of space and attention. Characters do not simply smile or frown but leer and grimace, their expressions stretching like wax masks to comical proportions. An exacting attention to detail in all things - from the creases in uniforms to the contours of a gun’s barrel - renders every object both exceedingly real and impossibly strange. Pitch-black inks outline and clash against stark whites for a popping effect underscored by slashing grays.

Instead, every element is pushed to the most cartoonish limits of representation. Nothing here is done by halves nothing is done even by fulls. Where most of his contemporaries (and their successors) shun all things messy in favor of a clean cinematic style insistent on linearity and literalism at the expense of ambiguity, spontaneity, and experimentation, Hirano revels in a love of the gauche and the gaudy.

Compared to the razor-sleek art direction and the grinding, epic scale that have come to characterize American war or superhero comics and the professional, poppy landscape of contemporary action manga, the quarter-century-old Hellsing’s splatterhouse approach can read as positively primitive.

Its style belongs to a similarly unapologetic old-school.

Its plot - a pseudo-sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula that chronicles the clandestine workings of a secret British society (managed by the last surviving descendant of Abraham Van Helsing) as they usher a domesticated and bemused Dracula into a three-way tussle with an assemblage of Vatican-backed Crusaders looking to burn Britain to the ground and a battalion of Nazis who have turned themselves into vampires through an unholy fusion of science and magic after half a century hiding in South America - is the stuff of grindhouse matinees. IT MUST SOUND odd to describe Kohta Hirano’s Hellsing as one of the most cutting-edge action comics of all time, or to describe Dark Horse Comics’s extravagant rereleases of the long-out-of-print series as cause for celebration.

Hellsing, Vol. 1 by Kohta Hirano