By: Scott Snyder (writer), Jordi Bernet (artist), Dave McCaig (colors), Jared K. Fletcher (letters), Joe Hughes (assistant editor) & Mark Doyle (editor)
The Story: We’ve enjoyed our stories of this new breed of American Vampires, but where did they come from?
Five Things:
1. Origins of American Vampires. Scott Snyder’s exploration of this new breed of “American Vampires” has had really cool parallels to the growth of the country. I’m pretty sure that Snyder is a history fan, so this makes sense: The Old World has Old World vampires, but this new and exciting land of possibility called America has new vampires that aren’t bound by the old rules. Of course, that is the “white man’s view” of America as there were people living in the Americas before Europeans got here. So seeing an initial experience with vampirism in the New World that is basically as old as the country and involving Native Americans was pretty cool. My only quibble was that it seemed like the lady vampire met a pretty fast demise after so much build-up and I wasn’t really sure what happened during the sequence where the man tomahawks her (one moment she is serene and the next she’s in a fetal ball getting chopped). Maybe she isn’t really dead?
2. Wonderful art (again) from Jordi Bernet and McCaig. There’s so much to love here. Seeing Bernet draw landscapes is just glorious. He’s an experienced master of the art form, so it’s no surprise, but the composition of these panels of mountains, waterfalls and canyons is just wonderful. His characters look great too. Such wonderful use of shadows! And I love that McCaig gets to color this with mostly flat colors. The comics world would be so much better if flat colors predominated.
3. Vampire on the final page. In a way, the final panel reminded me of something that Snyder did during his Detective Comics run when Dick Grayson was still under the influence of a mind control drug. At one point, one of the villains morphed into some freaky monster and Jock (the artist on Detective) SO nailed the depiction of the freaky thing that the only thing you could say was, “Holy crap!” Well, Snyder and Bernet play that kinda game here again on the final page. You kinda know that we’re headed for a big vampiric reveal, but I wasn’t ready for that!
4. Vassals of the Morning Star show up. The Vassals are a really important part of making American Vampire have a relevant long-term story. Without them, the story is just watching vampires interact with humans and that isn’t going to be interesting forever because we all know how that story ends (many humans die, humans fight back, most of the vampires die with one limping away to restart the cycle). But the concept that not only are the vampires a secret from the general population, but that the ancient order of vampire killers are also secret is pretty cool and fun to explore. One wonders if other ancient institutions like the Catholic Church would be aware of vampires too?
5. Great cover. When you read as many comics as I do, you almost get trained not to look at the covers because they so rarely have anything to do with the contents of the comic and are usually drawn by someone who isn’t the interior artist. But in this case we get a glorious image from regular series artist Rafael Albuquerque of John Book. The blacks and inkwash he’s done on Book’s head and shoulders are so thick that I can almost see the artboard warping from the moisture. Then the contrast between the vagueness of Book’s face and the harsh detail of the characters at the bottom of the image……wonderful stuff.
Conclusion: Middle chapters in stories have a hard time being “the best”, but this one does pretty well by telling a compelling story of vampire origins in the USA and finishes with a big HOLY CRAP moment. Nicely done (again).
Grade: B+
-Dean Stell
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Filed under: Vertigo Tagged: | American Vampire, American Vampire #21, American Vampire #21 review, Dave McCaig, Dean Stell, Jared K. Fletcher, Joe Hughes, Jordi Bernet, Mark Doyle, review, Scott Snyder, Vertigo
i believe it’s issue # 20.
[...] Filed under: Vertigo Tagged: American Vampire, American Vampire #21, American Vampire #21 review, Dave McCaig, Dean Stell, Jared K. Fletcher, Joe Hughes, Jordi Bernet, Mark Doyle, review, Scott Snyder, Vertigo Weekly Comic Book Review [...]
There really hasn’t been a bad issue which is great.
That fact actually makes it a hard series to review because it becomes very easy to say, “It was good….again.” And, you expectations begin to get warped where you can’t tell if an issue just failed to live up to lofty expectations and whether that makes it better or worse than something that was unexpectedly good.