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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
This collection started out a little slow for me- glad I started reading it in trade vs. monthly- I'm not sure I would have pushed through. But alas, it was worth it. American Vampire is the much needed antidote to the Twilight plague.
I didn’t enjoy the western element and it was too slow and jumped timelines too often.
I haven’t been living under a rock. I know that the names Scott Snyder and Stephen King are enough to make random people turn their heads when they overhear you in a supermarket. So I figured, why not tackle both names at once? Why not read a comic they wrote together? And about my favorite paranormal creature, the vampire, no less?
I expected greatness.
I should have lowered my expectations.
The Art
Oh wow. I didn’t know mainstream comics could look this awful and still get the greenlight for 9 volumes. Maybe Rafael Albuquerque is your cup of tea. Maybe you’re blind. I don’t know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The facial expressions in this were just…how???? Who sits down to draw, makes this monstrosity, and then calls it a day?
And who looks at it and says, “Yup, looks good! Let’s send this baby to print!”
Honestly, the only panels that didn’t look like garbage were the silhouette shots, and that’s only because I couldn’t see the people, only their black and white outlines.
The Story
Wow, Scott Snyder must be only good at one kind of bat-related property because he really sucks at vampires. He wanted to be original? He wanted to bring the fear back to vampires? Well, he seems to think that “original” means to do what everyone else is already doing.
Evil group of mustache twirling, chair sitting villains who do nothing for 90% of the story? Check ✔
Brooding love interest who saves the main character? Check ✔
Hints of a love triangle between the normal, good-for-you human and the bad boy vampire? Check ✔
And let us not forget that Snyder thinks phones run on magical vampire energy or perhaps just wishful thinking. He has a character who lives on a boat in 1925 and has a telephone? Um??? Did he do any research whatsoever? Radiophones are the only thing potentially likely but 1) there wasn’t even a transatlantic phone yet, and 2) regular (not radio) telephones still ran on a wire. There’s no way he has a regular phone on a boat. Forget vampires, the real strange stuff is that Henry the hobo is a time traveler.
Stephen King fared slightly better, but not by a lot. His side of the narrative at least tried to be coherent and well written, however pompous and pretentious it ended up being. It wasn’t really scary, except for one sequence that didn’t last for too long.
But what really nailed the stake into his coffin was this:
Why don’t you just kill me now, Stephen, so I don’t have to live in this world any longer?
TL;DR & Conclusion
I don’t understand why it was the way it was. The art was horrendous, the writing was just plain weird, and the tropes!!! It was so cliche!!! Which is hilarious because the forward and afterward are all about how it’s unique and transcends the current vampires, that they were gonna make vampires scary again, but I’m more afraid of Edward Cullen than I am of their stupid vampires.
Have you ever seen the movie Byzantium? With Saoirse Ronan? Well, it’s one of my favorite underrated vampire stories, and managed to do a past/present split perfectly while maintaining a linear narrative. If you want cool vampires, just watch that. It has some annoying parts, but you have to take what you can get. Or even just watch 2011's Priest, which is awful but better than this.
I expected greatness.
I should have lowered my expectations.
The Art
Oh wow. I didn’t know mainstream comics could look this awful and still get the greenlight for 9 volumes. Maybe Rafael Albuquerque is your cup of tea. Maybe you’re blind. I don’t know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The facial expressions in this were just…how???? Who sits down to draw, makes this monstrosity, and then calls it a day?
And who looks at it and says, “Yup, looks good! Let’s send this baby to print!”
Honestly, the only panels that didn’t look like garbage were the silhouette shots, and that’s only because I couldn’t see the people, only their black and white outlines.
The Story
Wow, Scott Snyder must be only good at one kind of bat-related property because he really sucks at vampires. He wanted to be original? He wanted to bring the fear back to vampires? Well, he seems to think that “original” means to do what everyone else is already doing.
Evil group of mustache twirling, chair sitting villains who do nothing for 90% of the story? Check ✔
Brooding love interest who saves the main character? Check ✔
Hints of a love triangle between the normal, good-for-you human and the bad boy vampire? Check ✔
And let us not forget that Snyder thinks phones run on magical vampire energy or perhaps just wishful thinking. He has a character who lives on a boat in 1925 and has a telephone? Um??? Did he do any research whatsoever? Radiophones are the only thing potentially likely but 1) there wasn’t even a transatlantic phone yet, and 2) regular (not radio) telephones still ran on a wire. There’s no way he has a regular phone on a boat. Forget vampires, the real strange stuff is that Henry the hobo is a time traveler.
Stephen King fared slightly better, but not by a lot. His side of the narrative at least tried to be coherent and well written, however pompous and pretentious it ended up being. It wasn’t really scary, except for one sequence that didn’t last for too long.
But what really nailed the stake into his coffin was this:
“Unfortunately she was his goddaughter”
Why don’t you just kill me now, Stephen, so I don’t have to live in this world any longer?
TL;DR & Conclusion
I don’t understand why it was the way it was. The art was horrendous, the writing was just plain weird, and the tropes!!! It was so cliche!!! Which is hilarious because the forward and afterward are all about how it’s unique and transcends the current vampires, that they were gonna make vampires scary again, but I’m more afraid of Edward Cullen than I am of their stupid vampires.
Have you ever seen the movie Byzantium? With Saoirse Ronan? Well, it’s one of my favorite underrated vampire stories, and managed to do a past/present split perfectly while maintaining a linear narrative. If you want cool vampires, just watch that. It has some annoying parts, but you have to take what you can get. Or even just watch 2011's Priest, which is awful but better than this.
adventurous
dark
emotional
medium-paced
dark
medium-paced
This series was a compilation of 5 episodes. The first two were a little muddled and confusing (mostly again I think from the format) but the idea was original and by the end of the fifth book I was really enjoying the series. It’s great to find any sort of new Stephen King stuff. Not sure how this originally got past me. And ultimately King quit the project after this block of books, so I’ve likewise quit the series. But for what it was, I enjoyed it.
I could really kick myself--hard--for waiting so long to give American Vampire a try.
I’ve been meaning to read it since Vertigo first started blurbing it in Hellblazer as an upcoming release, but I never quite made the commitment. I was skeptical. In the Twilight age, the vampire genre has taken a beating. Gone were the days when the undead were mad, bad and dangerous to know. Twilight and the urban fiction/romance genre had brought us a new breed of vampire. One who existed pretty much solely to fulfull every woman’s “bad boy” fantasy. Vamps were nothing more than pretty, pretty sex objects who were “dangerous.” And I use dangerous in parenthesis because there was usually way more brooding and emo angst involved than anything life-threatening.
Vampires, for me, had become a turn-off.
And now there’s American Vampire, which I finally sat down to read after seeing more and more of Rafael Albuquerque’s amazing art. I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular out of the story, so when it had blown me completely out of the water halfway through the first issue, I knew I was in for a treat.
Both Scott Synder and Stephen King’s (yes *that* Stephen King) narratives are top-notch. Pearl’s life in 1920’s Hollywood and Skinner’s in the Wild West of the late 1800s are woven together flawlessly, and provide a welcome break from a traditional, linear comic narrative. Each issue gives you just enough narrative for each character to leave you hanging, wanting to come back to find out what happens next.
It is a wonderful way to get to know two very different leading characters. Both Pearl and Skinner are a return to everything that’s great about vampires: good looks, violent as hell, and very, very unafraid to spill a little blood. Or blow up an entire town. Skinner is particularly remoseless, a wicked delight from page to page. Watching their separate stories develop and occasionally intertwine is what is going to keep me hooked for issues to come.
Rafael Albuquerque’s art and Dave McCaig’s colors bring the narrative to life in a way most comics fail to capture. This is the first time in a very, very long time that I have studied almost every individual panel, looking for hidden clues or nuances, or just admiring the beauty.
American Vampire is a perfect marriage of art and storytelling, one that shows the full and powerful potential of the comic book as a storytelling medium. It is the kind of collection that makes me realize just how ill-paired some of the stories and art are in other series I read. American Vampire, in short, is comic book storytelling done right, and flawlessly and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a damned good time.
I’ve been meaning to read it since Vertigo first started blurbing it in Hellblazer as an upcoming release, but I never quite made the commitment. I was skeptical. In the Twilight age, the vampire genre has taken a beating. Gone were the days when the undead were mad, bad and dangerous to know. Twilight and the urban fiction/romance genre had brought us a new breed of vampire. One who existed pretty much solely to fulfull every woman’s “bad boy” fantasy. Vamps were nothing more than pretty, pretty sex objects who were “dangerous.” And I use dangerous in parenthesis because there was usually way more brooding and emo angst involved than anything life-threatening.
Vampires, for me, had become a turn-off.
And now there’s American Vampire, which I finally sat down to read after seeing more and more of Rafael Albuquerque’s amazing art. I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular out of the story, so when it had blown me completely out of the water halfway through the first issue, I knew I was in for a treat.
Both Scott Synder and Stephen King’s (yes *that* Stephen King) narratives are top-notch. Pearl’s life in 1920’s Hollywood and Skinner’s in the Wild West of the late 1800s are woven together flawlessly, and provide a welcome break from a traditional, linear comic narrative. Each issue gives you just enough narrative for each character to leave you hanging, wanting to come back to find out what happens next.
It is a wonderful way to get to know two very different leading characters. Both Pearl and Skinner are a return to everything that’s great about vampires: good looks, violent as hell, and very, very unafraid to spill a little blood. Or blow up an entire town. Skinner is particularly remoseless, a wicked delight from page to page. Watching their separate stories develop and occasionally intertwine is what is going to keep me hooked for issues to come.
Rafael Albuquerque’s art and Dave McCaig’s colors bring the narrative to life in a way most comics fail to capture. This is the first time in a very, very long time that I have studied almost every individual panel, looking for hidden clues or nuances, or just admiring the beauty.
American Vampire is a perfect marriage of art and storytelling, one that shows the full and powerful potential of the comic book as a storytelling medium. It is the kind of collection that makes me realize just how ill-paired some of the stories and art are in other series I read. American Vampire, in short, is comic book storytelling done right, and flawlessly and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a damned good time.