Hypnotic Horror: 10 Stunning Vampirella Covers by Jay Anacleto

If you love horror art and horror comics, you’ve almost certainly heard of Jay Anacleto. The Filipino artist has been cranking out impossibly detailed, photo-realistic covers for Dynamite Entertainment for over two decades now, and somewhere along the way he basically became the visual voice of my favorite vampire, the Daughter of Drakulon herself – Vampirella.

The Artist Behind the Magic

Anacleto’s path into comics is wonderfully weird. The guy studied dentistry in Manila before deciding (wisely, in my opinion) that he’d rather draw teeth than fix them. His break came through fellow Filipino artist Whilce Portacio, who connected him with Brian Haberlin at Avalon Studios. That led to Aria in 1999—an urban fantasy series that became the second-best-selling comic that January. Not a bad debut.

What makes Anacleto’s work instantly recognizable is his hyper-detailed pencil technique. It’s photo-realistic in a way that’s almost unsettling (I mean that as the highest compliment). His faces have this glossy, Victorian portrait quality—think Norman Rockwell meets Frank Frazetta at a midnight séance. Critics compare him to Michael Turner and Mauro Cascioli, but honestly? Anacleto has his own thing going on.

Here’s what I find fascinating: his raw pencil work, before any coloring, is sometimes more striking than the finished product. There’s an elegance to those black-and-white pages that just works for gothic horror. It’s probably why his virgin variants (covers without logos or trade dress) command such ridiculous prices from collectors.

How Anacleto Reshaped Dynamite’s Visual Identity

Now, I’m not saying Dynamite Entertainment would be nothing without Jay Anacleto. But I am saying the publisher’s entire aesthetic—especially for their pulp horror properties—owes a massive debt to this man’s pencils.

For 25+ years, Anacleto has illustrated covers for virtually every character in Dynamite’s stable: Red Sonja, Dejah Thoris, Vampirella. But Vampirella is where he truly left his mark. His 2021 hardcover collection, The Dynamite Art of Jay Anacleto, showcases 191 pages of cover artwork, and reviewers weren’t exaggerating when they called it possibly “the best book of fantasy art you’ll find on bookstore shelves.”

What Anacleto brought to Dynamite—and to Vampirella specifically—was a level of technical mastery that elevated pulp material into legitimate art. Before him, horror comics covers could feel campy or disposable. Anacleto’s covers don’t feel disposable. They feel like something you’d frame and hang in a gallery (or a very atmospheric study, at least).

The Vampirella Legacy

I’ve been tracking Anacleto’s Vampirella work for years now, and the breadth is staggering:

Vampirella: Feary Tales (2015) gave us some of his most celebrated covers. Those Blood Red Edition variants? Chef’s kiss. He nailed the Victorian gothic vibe while keeping Vampirella dangerous and seductive—a harder balance than it sounds.

Vampirella: Dark Reflections (2024) featured multiple Anacleto variants, including collectible foil editions. I remember his cover for issue #3 causing a minor bidding war on eBay. Deserved.

Vampirella (2025) has featured his work as retailer incentive variants across issues #1-5, with various ratio editions (1:10, 1:15, 1:20, 1:25). If you’re not familiar with ratio variants: that means a shop has to order 10, 15, 20, or 25 regular copies to get one incentive variant. The rarer the ratio, the more expensive the cover. Anacleto’s 1:25 virgin variants regularly sell for $15-20 or more. His standard 1:10 covers go for $5-10. Not bad for a comic book cover.

One of my favorite Anacleto projects was his 2016 three-part connecting cover series spanning Red Sonja #1, Dejah Thoris #1, and Vampirella #1. These interconnected covers created a triptych of Dynamite’s trinity of female icons in Anacleto’s signature style. Trying to hunt down all three virgin variants was an expensive nightmare (and absolutely worth it).

Why Anacleto’s Vampi Art Rocks

Here’s the thing about Anacleto’s influence on Dynamite and Vampirella specifically: he proved that horror comics could be beautiful without losing their edge. His Vampirella doesn’t look like a cartoon character. She looks like something that might actually exist in some nightmare dimension—something that could step out of the shadows and into your bedroom.

That’s the magic trick. His photo-realistic approach makes the impossible seem tangible. Vampirella becomes real on an Anacleto cover in a way she doesn’t with other artists. You can see texture in her costume, individual strands of hair, the reflection of moonlight in her eyes. It’s technically brilliant, sure, but it’s also genuinely eerie.

And that aesthetic—that marriage of technical mastery with gothic pulp sensibilities—became Dynamite’s calling card. Look at their horror covers now, even by other artists. You can see Anacleto’s influence everywhere. The attention to detail, the photo-realistic faces, the way characters are posed like classical portrait subjects. He didn’t just draw great Vampirella covers. He showed the entire publisher what their books could look like.

In an industry drowning in variant covers (most of which are cynical cash grabs), Anacleto’s work stands out because it doesn’t feel like marketing. Each piece feels carefully considered and meticulously rendered. They’re not just comic book covers. They’re art.

For me—and for plenty of other horror comics fans—tracking down Anacleto’s Vampirella variants has become something of an obsession. These covers represent contemporary comic art at its finest, where pulp horror meets fine art technique, and where the Daughter of Drakulon has found perhaps her most perfect visual interpreter.

The guy who studied dentistry in Manila ended up giving Vampirella her definitive modern face.

Not a bad legacy.