American Vampire Book One
This is a comic that really impressed me. Writer Scott Snyder (with some help from Stephen King) and artist Rafael Albuquerque actually took the tired vampire trope and made something that felt fresh and interesting out of it. This is a challenge that comic writers and artists are always being tasked with – how can you tell a “new” Batman or Spider-Man story? – and it’s something they probably don’t get enough credit for.
So the idea here is that vampires are a species of predator that has arrived in the New World (that would be America), not just to feed on people (“Americans are only food, like the great slabs of cow they shovel down their throats!”) but to get rich. These vampires are nasty, rich, decadent types hailing from Britain, France, Russia, and other parts of the continent. Because they live forever they can invest for the long term and basically they form a cabal of hypercapitalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
A run in with a deadly gunslinger named Skinner Sweet sends the vampire bloodline off on a tangent though. Sweet is infected by one of the European vampires just as he’s being killed, which means he comes back from the dead as a vampire himself. But not just any vampire but a new-and-improved American vampire. Which means, among other things, that he has a greater tolerance for sunlight. Then Sweet brings Pearl Jones, a young woman hoping to make her way in Hollywood, back as a vampire after she’s killed by the same crew of Eurotrash in the 1920s. After she “rises” Sweet explains what’s happened to her as a kind of evolution: European vampires are, “in automotive terms . . . like old, broken-down European clunkers” while Skinner and Pearl are “like shiny new 1926 Fords. Top of the line, just rolled out onto the showroom floor. See sometimes, when the blood hits someone new, from somewhere new . . . it makes something new. With a whole new bag of tricks.”
These bloodlines keep branching off (it’s surprisingly easy to get infected by vampire blood and so turn into one), but Skinner Sweet, Pearl Jones, and Jones’s (former) BFF Hattie Hargrove are the main recurring American vampires. Only they don’t work together unless they’re forced to since they all hate each other. And there are other people/vampires involved as well, and they in turn have descendants as the story proceeds to work its way through several decades of American history.
To be honest, at times I did feel a little lost keeping up with who was who and when we were. Part of the problem might have been that I was reading a collection of issues #1-11 in one of DC’s “compact comics” editions. These are at least more reasonably priced (comics and graphic novels have become very expensive) but you do lose something in the smaller format. But I also think the story jerked around a bit too much and was hard to follow in places. Not enough to stop me having a great time with it though.
Alex Good 