Quick Review

American Vampire, Volume 1 by Scott Snyder

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Rafael Albuquerque, Dave McCaig, and Steve Wands have all collaborated here to make one of the more visually satisfying horror books of recent memory.  Everything works.  The layout and character design is dynamic and exciting, and thoroughly modern, though it does hark back -- specially in the big splash panels -- to the kind of 70s movie art so beloved of the Tarantino generation.  McCaig's color is specially satisfying and suggestive, often carrying most of the mood so that, for example, when a nest of vampires is revealed everything is suddenly a rich plumb.  It's the perfect balance to Albuerque's elegant, sometimes almost facile line, which might look flip with a less rich or accomplished colorist.  Even the lettering fits the style of the thing perfectly.

As for the collaboration of the two writers, actually it isn't, quite.  What it is are two distinct story-lines that converge and diverge of very slight necessity maybe twice in any meaningful way.  That's just fine, as it turns out.  The switch back and forth between King's western and Snyder's flapper story keeps things lively and doesn't allow for too much time spent with either set of characters  which is frankly just as well.  The premise here is that the American vampires are  something all but wholly new.  Unlike their European progenitor, the American monsters are bigger, stronger, less sensitive to the light of day, etc.  (Get it? USA! USA!)  This may be obvious and more than a little xenophobic and so on, but it works surprisingly well as a point of departure for the biting and the battles and the rest.

The plotting from both Snyder and King is clever enough, and the dialogue whips right along, but the historical detail is often lazily stupid.  Louise Brooks wasn't a movie star in 1925.  The Elephant Man was not someone anyone in either story was likely to have heard of.  Nobody ever got rich off one dime novel, ever, and so on. Even some of the slang and cursing sounds less than authentic.  And there is the traditional vampire nonsense of having the means to destroy a vampire utterly, and instead trapping them "forever" under either water or rock.  You know, the inexplicable decent into dumbass.

Still, frustrating as it is that no one evidently checks a word King writes even when all he's writing is a comic, this was a fun, fast little bloodbath.



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