A comic book series which ran in 2000 AD from Prog 1243 to 1249. It was written by John Smith and drawn, inked and coloured by Frazer Irving. A Love Like Blood concerned Jacques, the heir of the Sangreal - an ancient vampire family which had infiltrated the modern corporate world through ownership of pharmaceutical and biotech companies. (Amongst other things, their operations involved engineering synthetic haemorrhagic fevers and variant Ebola virus.) The Sangreal were in constant conflict with the Luperci, a similarly well-established clan of werewolves with their claws in the military-industrial complex.
Following a raid on a werewolf cell in the Florida Everglades, Jacques was attacked and bitten by a Luperci agent during a retaliatory operation targeting a bio-lab in the Swiss Alps. He should have gone into immediate toxic shock – instead, he fell in love. Tracking down Bethany, the Luperci who bit him, in Paris, they embarked on an illicit affair. After she fell pregnant, the pair were marked for death by their families. Fleeing across Europe and pursued by supernatural death squads, they went to ground in Venice. However, Bathori vampire-assassins were not far behind ...
As seen in 2000 AD’s Necronauts, Irving’s characteristic sinister style is well suited to this type of modern horror tale. Particularly potent images are Karkossa (the monstrous vampire king with a nice line in Hawaiian shirts) feeding his family, Jacques' entry into the Lear jet and the red carpet laid out for Karkossa's arrival. A Love Like Blood’s strengths are in its swift blend of misgivings about corporate power and slick dialogue about black ops and blood feuds, combined with a twist on both the tragic love and vampire genres.
The series drew some criticism from those who felt it was derivative of the scenarios posited in the role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, although both Smith and Irving have claimed they knew nothing of the game when the series was pitched and scripted. Ironically, promotional material for the Sony Pictures film Underworld elicited a similar response from fans of A Love Like Blood.