I've heard a lot of buzz from Snyder over American Vampire. But, to be honest I feel pretty bored with the vampire trend. I read this only because of my library's limited selection meant I ended up with it. I was pleasantly surprised.
There are some storytelling elements traditionally associated with horror fiction, and this first gave me pause. But again, I was pleasantly surprised. The title character and the "star" is the bad guy, Skinner Sweets. In horror franchises, this often means that the good guys are just fodder, disposable idiots to feed the bad guy.
A problem with Batman movies, which could have happened here, is that the villains are always more interesting. Who wants to watch Christian Bale growl at people while you have Heath Ledger being insane and awesome?
American Vampire deftly avoids both of these. Sweets is a pretty minor character, and actually serves a fairly benevolent role in the main story. The main character, Pearl, skips over the "ohmygodamIreallyavampire" stuff and embarks on a quest to enact vengenance on her enemies. We feel her rage at the wealthy Hollywood elites who prey on young girls. Indeed, there are missing girls from this time period who likely fell victim to lecherous Hollywood types.
The male lead feels a bit obvious, though. "I love you and I was in the army so I can help you kill bad guys!" How convienvent.
In the back up story, I was surrpised again by Stephen King's writing. I was afraid that moving from novel to comic would mean an overly wordy writing style. Such is not the case. While reading it, King deftly shifts the audience from cheering for Skinner against the vampire elites, to hoping the sheriff and his crew kill him once and for all. Because this section is a flashback, we know they fail. But I found myself interested in knowing how they fail. What exactly would happen?
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