Anita Blake.

I acquired a complete collection of Laurel K. Hamilton's comic book adaptation of her Anita Blake character. 45 issues that apparently adapt the first 3 novels: Guilty Pleasures, The Laughing Corpse & Circus of the Damned.
I'm pretty much going into this blind as I have never read any of the novels, but from what I understand, Laurel Hamilton was directly involved with the comic book adaptation, so that's a positive selling point for me.
Now, being disgruntled by the sparkly-vampires as portrayed in the Twilight Gaga (apologies to the Lady!), I want to give this a go.
As far as vampires go, my favorite vampires are as portrayed in Brian Lumley's Necroscope novels. I certainly don't expect to see these types of vampires in Ms. Hamilton's series (but you never know!), but I hope this series will help wash the taste of sparkly-vampires out of my...eyes?
Perhaps after reading these adaptations I will try to find her prose novels.

I read the first few of the comics and, well, eh.

I think I wasn't the target audience however.

If you want to get that "sparkly-vampire" taste out of your mouth, you should try True Blood.

We just started watching it and are almost done with season one, it's a pretty interesting show, started out a little slow and it has some flaws. But it's a much better interpretation of vampires. My wife started reading the books and she says those are pretty good too, but they are somewhat different from the show, they apparently take some liberties. But the show has a frequently naked Anna Paquin so there's that. It's crammed full of adult themes too, definitely not for the little ones.

Is that the vampire show that Christopher Meloni went to after quitting from Law & Order: SVU? He's a good actor.

True Blood is a pretty nice show. There's a bit of slowness I think in SEason two revolving around Maryanne's arc but 5 seasons in and it's damn entertaining!

Wait, Anita Blake and True Blood are related somehow? I haven't read or seen either, but i thought True Blood's main character was named Sookie Stackhouse, or something like that?

J.M. Hunter wrote:

True Blood is a pretty nice show. There's a bit of slowness I think in SEason two revolving around Maryanne's arc but 5 seasons in and it's damn entertaining!

I thought season one was a wee bit slow, does it get worse?

Nah, it's gets much better imo.

I read The Laughing Corpse. It has a few cool moments, most of it is an endless stream of boring conversations, whining, and Anita pretending to be tough even as people save her from the bad guys. The novels are very poorly translated. Too much rambling dialogue and Anita pouting and posing. It just sort of oozes along, leaving a sticky trail of bickering and endless conversation, with the occasional spurt of action or zombie attacks... none of which last long enough. In fact, the endless dialogue slows everything to a crawl -- long dribbling pointless conversations that lead nowhere and accomplish nothing whatsoever. "Are you afraid of zombies?" "No." "You're afraid of zombies. You're phobic"), and the entire plot is overshadowed by Anita's boring internal musings ("I like this shirt. It hides the gun"). And it has a lot of unintentionally hilarious moments -- if a guy who looked like Jean-Claude (including poet shirt and thigh-high pirate boots) turned up in a red light district, he'd be handed motel keys from half a dozen dudes.

My wife was a big fan of the early Anita Blake novels and also bought the Marvel adaptations when they came out in graphic novel form. From what I've heard, the early books in the series were quite good; but after about the fifth or sixth one the heroine's escalating powers and expanding harem of supernatural boy-toys became too Mary Sue-ish for many readers.

Personally, I prefer werewolves to vampires; but that's my personal taste.

I really liked the Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, remake of The Wolfman.