Lilith, Vol. 1
Writer/Artist: Colin Howell
Colorist: Warnia Sachdeva
Author: Jim Campbell
Publisher: Vault Comics
Publication date: October 2025
When I was younger, I always envied the movies my older cousins watched in college, the clothes they wore, and the music they played. And I was reminded of this recently while reading Volume 2 of Lilith. 1. A fun new book that feels indebted to the culture of about 20 years ago.
Lilith is Colin Howell’s debut solo series, published by Vault Comics and starring the title character Lilith, a femme fatale demon. She is trapped in the human world for reasons unknown. For the time being, she is modeling for a goth/alternative clothing line that dresses her in all sorts of revealing outfits.
The story is filled with one cheesecake after another, which is a great blessing for a Sapphire book. I love squeaky clean, soft sapphic romance as much as the next person, but I also love being reminded that queer women are fucked up and carnally into women.
The art is very tight, the pages are structured, and the limited color palette is used effectively. I pay particular attention to facial expressions. Howell isn’t afraid to make Lilith look stupid. Also, the priest antagonist later in the book has a Guy Fawkes mask with a Batman: The Animated Series look, which I really loved.
I also want to pay special attention to the composition of the battle scenes. Combat scene composition is easy to learn but difficult to master. It relies on knowledge of foreshortening, perspective, positive and negative space, and storytelling (because battle scenes are stories within other stories). I could go on for another 200 words about fight scenes, how they work, what works and what doesn’t, but this little digression will suffice for this review. Please know that Lilith is good at combat.
You could say this story is a reheating of the nachos from many paranormal shows like Buffy and Angel from the late 90s and early 00s. Some of the lessons can be learned and used, such as being openly gay among the main cast, but others are not. The stories are cheesy, and I love a lot of cheese, especially when it comes to stories that violate the “law of cool.” Demons are cool, especially when they use body horror-adjacent transformations.
But at times, the stupidity almost took me out of the story. One of the characters, Penelope, the owner of a specialty bookstore, shows such a lack of self-preservation that she goes beyond being cute and becomes a plot twist as to why the devil appears. I understand that you’re using an old metaphor, but some are metaphors and some are clichés. That’s true even if the cliché is lampshaded by the main character.
Lilith has potential and does what she was supposed to do in the first volume. A solid piece of work throughout, with enough questions and intrigue to keep you interested in the next volume. Only time will tell if they can do something unique with this metaphor and the influences it wears on its sleeve.
Lilith Vol. 1 is on sale at bookstores.
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