Criminal 8: My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies

The Criminal books are all set in the same world with many recurring characters, but they tend to alternate between ones that follow a broad overarching storyline and others that are more standalones with nothing but passing references to some familiar names. So Bad Night was about the comic strip writer Jacob Kurtz and then The Sinners had Tracy Lawless returning as the protagonist. The Last of the Innocent only mentioned Sebastian Hyde (the city’s crime boss) briefly and then Wrong Time Wrong Place was another Tracy Lawless story.

Which brings us to My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, which deals with a new character in a separate adventure that just includes a phone call to Hyde to resolve the plot.

The central character here is Ellie, a girl with a troubled past who is in a drug rehab facility. While there she meets up with a young man named Skip. They get romantically involved and then break out and live on the run for a while before things come to the usual violent end.

I didn’t think very much of this one. It’s one of the two shortest books in the series, consisting of only a single issue. The story has a simple twist that isn’t too unexpected, and the main interest is in the telling of Ellie’s story through flashbacks. Her mother was a junky and this messed her up so that she idolizes famous people who died from overdoses. She’s also fallen in with a lot of bad people, including Hyde’s gang. There’s a link to the character of Leo from Coward, but that only comes in at the end.

I didn’t know what to make of Ellie’s referencing the song “Stevie Smith” by Vic Chesnutt and quoting from it. She doesn’t mention the fact that the lines she’s quoting, the lyrics of the song, are from the poem “Not Waving But Drowning” by Stevie Smith. I’m assuming though that Ed Brubaker was aware of this and he just didn’t want us to think that Ellie knew.

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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.

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Empire of the Dead: Act One

The set-up for Empire of the Dead felt so much like that of George Romero’s movie Land of the Dead that I had to check the dates. Once again we’re in New York City (the “Empire” in the title is for “Empire State”) sometime after the zombie apocalypse. A social elite live in high-rises while a military force keeps the zombies at bay and an underclass survive on eating rats while being entertained by zombie fights held in Central Park. But the zombies, while always restless, are getting smarter. We follow one of them, a former SWAT team member named Xavier, as she returns to the city with actual thoughts in her head.

A lot of this sounds like Land of the Dead, but the movie had come out ten years earlier and this story adds one big wrinkle. Those elites who run the city are actually . . . vampires! It seems the bloodsuckers are a few rungs ahead of the flesh-eaters in the hierarchy of the undead, being smarter and all, but there are complications. As I understood it, a vampire can actually be turned into a zombie if they become infected, so if that happens they have to be “excommunicated.” To kill a zombie you still have to shoot them in the head, but to kill a vampire you have to split the heart in two, left side from right. It doesn’t have to be with a wooden stake.

At least that was what I thought was going on, mainly gleaned from some expository dialogue. But if you get killed by a vampire, do you come back to life as a vampire, or a zombie? Or a zombie-vampire? That seems to be a live question with one victim that the doctor character here is studying. I’ll also add that the doctor is the sister of Barbara from Night of the Living Dead, whose story is retold and extended a bit in a nice little bit of fan service.

You’ll have guessed from this that there’s a lot of world-building going on. And I did find the notion of zombies vs. vampires kind of interesting in an Underworld-style monster mash-up sort of way. But I don’t know if I’ll ever find out what happened as Act One is only the first of three volumes of this series (each containing five issues) and I haven’t been able to find the other two anywhere.

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