American Vampire Book Two
The initial run of American Vampire comics jumped around a bit time-wise, but told a coherent story about the spread of a special strain of vampirism in the American Old West, led by the original American vampire, Skinner Sweet. An American vampire is a tougher strain than his Old World forebears, you see, and Skinner himself is well-nigh indestructible. Luckily there are forces arrayed against him, including an ancient society of vampire hunters called the Vassals of the Morning Star and Skinner’s own vampiric (but upstanding) descendants: Jim and Felicia Book, and Pearl Jones and her normie husband Henry Preston.
This anthology collects four standalone storylines set in the same American Vampire universe and it constitutes more of a grab-bag than Book One. Scott Snyder is still the writer for all of them, though his original partner Rafael Albuquerque only draws the first and last sections. Once again we’re on a rollercoaster trip through American history. In the first story, “Ghost Wars,” it’s the Second World War and Henry Preston is sent on a mission with a bunch of guys from the Vassals of the Morning Star to take out a vampire colony on a Japanese-occupied island during the Pacific campaign. Skinner Sweet has come along for the ride, which, when Pearl finds out, leads to her joining her hubby on the island and leading to a lot of vampire-on-vampire violence. The second story, “Survival of the Fittest,” has Felicia Book and her boyfriend, Cash McCogan, heading off to Nazi Germany just before America’s entry into the war to investigate a possible cure for vampirism. There they run into a legion of Nazi vampires and an ancient race of super-vampires the Nazis were trying to exterminate. This leads to another battle royale and a lot of vampire-on-vampire violence. The third story, “The Beast in the Cave,” is set in New Mexico Territory in 1871, which is before Skinner Sweet has been turned into a vampire. He and Jim Book are U.S. soldiers fighting Indians and the natives have a secret weapon in the form of a reawakened vampire woman named Mimiteh. And in the final story, “Death Race,” we’re in California in the mid-1950s and a James Dean-type rebel in a hot rod turns out to actually be a vampire hunter named Travis Kidd. He’s on the trail of Skinner Sweet, who we must figure has a hundred lives by now. The Vassals try to give Travis a helping hand but he prefers to work alone.
In other words there’s a whole lot going on and things only connect in the loosest of ways. For what it’s worth, I thought the fourth story was the best and the third the weakest. I’d actually forgotten about Felicia Book and Cash McCogan from the original story, but the Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe from “Survival of the Fittest” worked pretty well. “Ghost Wars” had a lot of action but I thought the story flimsy. In any event, Snyder was clearly intent on stretching the basic mythology in a bunch of different directions, and while the results were a lot less coherent than the original series it’s all entertaining enough if you just want to enjoy the action.
