By: Scott Snyder (writer), Rafael Albuquerque (art), Dave McCaig (colors), Jared K. Fletcher (letters), Gregory Lockard (assistant editor) & Mark Doyle (editor)
The Story: Pearl and Skinner sniffing out vampires in 50’s Hollywood.
A few things (with very minor SPOILERS): 1). The art is great. – It’s easy to carry on about how well Rafael Albuquerque draws his action vampire scenes. His vampires are so nasty looking and energetic that they really spoil us. A True Blood vampire – with their wussy fangs snapping into place – just isn’t very scary anymore. But Albuquerque also is able to ace all the quiet panels where he needs to command the scene through clever use of perspective, framing, level of zooming in, detailed backgrounds, proper looking machines, etc.. Love the difference between his vampires at rest and regular people….the vampires just have this smoldering tension about them whereas the people look kinda dopey. Dave McCaig is all over the colors in this issue too. Usually if you actually notice a colorist, it’s because they are doing something great or something terrible and McCaig was definitely adding to the visuals in this issue.
2). Clever use of history. – There are obvious parallels to the 50’s Red Scare in this issue where Hollywood was persecuted for having “communist sympathizers” in their midst. But, for some reason this issue made me wonder if Snyder is trying to say that the entire “Red Scare” was really about vampires?? I love the whole “hidden history” aspect of American Vampire.
3). Explaining Skinner’s cooperation. – Now we know why Skinner is being so helpful all of a sudden. It makes sense as everything we’ve learned about Skinner indicates that he’s not really a “company man”, nor does he work well with others. We readers should have known something like this was coming since it’s hard to imagine AV getting to the 1980s and Skinner is running the US Branch of the VMS.
4). New Big-Bad! – I guess AV has had a few central villains in specific arcs, but they’ve been pretty low key. This villain – who we meet at the very end of the issue – seems like a much more substantial threat. We don’t really learn who this murky figure is, but one must wonder if it is related at all to the Lord of Nightmares storyline. I don’t want to spoil that story too much, but given the involvement of the Soviets in LoN and the obvious parallels to the Red Scare, could this be the same guy? It would also sync up with Skinner’s origin from some Carpathian vampires, right? If this is the case, how is Snyder going to manage his writing so that a reveal in AV doesn’t step on the plotline of LoN? [Note: Of course Snyder wouldn’t take that approach unless he knew what he was doing. He’s too clever of a writer to screw things up that way. Isn’t it nice to have faith in a writer?]
Conclusion: Another one of those months where I could almost use a Control-V for my review: American Vampire is great and this is another example of why it’s one of the best ongoing series on the market. It hasn’t had an issue that was even “just okay” yet.
Grade: A-
– Dean Stell
Grade
Conclusion