By: Tomm Coker & Daniel Freedman (writers), Coker (art), Freedman (colors) & Michael David Thomas (letters)
The Story: An ex-soldier battles vampires in Hong Kong to free his vampiric girlfriend’s soul.
What’s Good: Hey! Nice fight scene! Well-done fight scenes have become a rarity in modern comics. Too many fights just show random assemblages of dramatic poses from the fight instead of the actual flow of what happened. Maybe I’m weird, but sometimes I read fights in other comics and flip back and forth a few times because I can’t figure out how Daredevil ended up in a position to choke some guy or what Batman could have jumped off of to be in a position to kick some guy in the head. Usually, the answers just aren’t there because the creators must not have enjoyed kung fu movies when they were young…. All of that brings me to a really nice scene in this issue where the protagonist busts into a nightclub office to kill some vampires and gives us a nicely choreographed fight scene with an actual flow to the action. It always makes sense which arm the characters are using to perform actions, all the inanimate objects stay in position; blood splatters are on the correct wall in the next panel, etc. It’s just really nicely done.
Undying Love has a dark sense of humor too. In the aforementioned scene in the nightclub office, when the protagonist busts in, these three vampires are entertaining themselves by singing karaoke, playing dominos and looking at Playboy centerfolds while two dead strippers are flopped on the couches with twisty party straws (like we all drank out of when we were kids) sticking out of their chests so the vampires could drink their blood.
As for the main story, I think anyone who enjoys modern vampires stories will get a kick out of this as it plays with lots of standard vampire tropes such as the power a vampire has over its “offspring”, warring sects of vampires, a “kid”-vampire who is actually incredibly old and powerful, etc.
The art is pretty hot too. Everything is rooted in photoreference, and while my favorite form of comic art is someone like Chris Bachalo just cartooning his ass off, I can really appreciate well-done photo-reference. For a gritty story like this, it is perfect and it allows the artist to not worry about basic anatomy stuff. If I had to guess, Coker knew what every panel would look like and then got a group of friends or actors to play out each scene, which he photographed and then digitized the hell out of them to make it look cool (i.e. not even remotely photo-comicy). It’s a nice looking comic.
What’s Not So Good: My only big complaint is that this issue didn’t go back to the vampire girlfriend and she’s kinda important as the touchstone for why this dude is going all Frank Castle on the vampires of Hong Kong. Even though I read issue #1 and could remember the story, I’m still a big fan of small amounts of recap somewhere in the issue.
I also really couldn’t tell what happened in a confusing (for me) final scene. It shows a drunken guy busting into a locked bedroom and I couldn’t tell if the drunk guy was a vampire or if the girl on the bed was the “vampire girlfriend…” The scene is presented as if I should know what I’m seeing, but I didn’t.
Conclusion: This was a pretty good issue with lots of well-scripted and drawn action. Coker also makes use of photo reference to do the things that this style excels at (accurate anatomy and postures) without falling into the BAD things that can happen when lazy artist use it (using screen grabs of celebrities). If you like modern/gritty vampire stories, this will be a winner for you.
Grade: B
-Dean Stell
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