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A review by aceinit
American Vampire, Vol. 1 by Scott Snyder
5.0
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.