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Books (Graphic)

Graphic Book Review:
Helheim Vol. 1: The Witch War

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Helheim-graphicZombos Says: Fair to Good

The draugr of Norse mythology takes center stage here with a nod to the Golem's protector modus operandi and Frankenstein's Monster's patchwork quilting of stitched body parts. Only here, Cullen Bunn and Joelle Jones's draugr is a giant pawn caught between two warring witches and their demon-play to best each other.

No reason is given as to why Bera, the beautiful witch, and Groa, the ugly hag of a witch (note how ugly witches always have names that imply ugliness, too), are feuding and decimating the countryside in the process. From the level of despair and desolation shown it's been going on for a long while.

The story places us in the middle of the conflict at the start, with a hunting party being hunted as they quickly return to their village with the wildmen in pursuit. An opening salvo of bloodshed and hacked limbs within their village gates reveals the ferocity and supernatural nature of their adversaries. When the handsome, brawny, Rikard is killed, Bera reveals her true talent by bringing him back to life. Larger and smellier than before and able to swing a mean axe, Rikard is now a hulking dead creature under her control. She sends him after Groa and her demon minions.

A puzzling question arises early on: why does each witch have a village of her own to fight for her, especially after all the constant turmoil and lack of food this incessant animosity is causing? Either Bunn is riffing off the historically important village idiot role (and one still prevalent today in politics, by the way) by twisting it around to one of a village witch role (which would be closest to the village savant role I'd surmise), or perhaps he's presuming we won't notice. Or maybe he's cleverly turned this whole village idiot role into a plural endeavor, implying that each villager is stupid enough to stick around, waiting to get killed in the crossfire, rendering an idiot village in effect?

Other plot-convenient assumptions let him jump through the issues of this collected series without applying effort toward providing explanation or illustration: for instance, Rikard has amassed an army of men, a hundred or so, to fight along with him by issue four, but in issue three he's alone, needs the help of a little girl to stitch his head back into one piece, and he still smells badly. How he amasses an army of men to follow him is anyone's guess, but he instantly has one by issue four.

Helheim: The Witch War has a Van Helsing vibe to it. If you just accept it and don't ask questions, or don't bother to think too deeply as to whys and wherefores, it's an entertaining horror story that makes less sense than it ought to, but still provides some good scenes and moments. But if you're pigheaded and need more flesh to the motivation-backbone of your storytelling, just remember the good thing is this is only volume one. Assume that volume two will flesh it all out better and you'll be fine.

If you can wait for volume two, that is.

Graphic Book Review: Half Past Danger

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Zombos Says: Good

Once again, the Nazis are up to no good in Half Past Danger. This time around they’ve got dinosaurs and a deadly secret, with Stephen Mooney and a very good period-toned coloration from Jordie Bellair tying it all together into a neat package wrapped around with colorful main players.

There’s a Samurai-wielding Japanese Naval Landing Forces ex-soldier; a super GI soldier–but he doesn’t carry around a shield; an Irish soldier who carries around a bottle or two that’s either half-empty or half-full at any given moment; a femme fatale with long black hair and a fetish for long black jumpsuits who carries the mission’s intrigue; and the German Officer they’re up against, who carries the usual supercilious attitude and Aryan-inspired confidence of cool determination we’ve come to expect from our movie and comic book German Officer nemeses.

Much grease gun and fiery mayhem explodes across this collected six issues’ worth of vibrant, retro-storied pages, which hints a little The Lost World: Jurassic Park, a little multi-chaptered Republic Serial, and with Bellair’s appropriate earth tones, military tones, Nazi tones, submarine interior tones, and jungle campfire at night tones, smoothing Mooney’s heavy lines (that are too heavy at times, obliterating facial nuances), it all moves breezily and 1943’s-ish through hold-on-to-your-ass military exploits, haul-your-ass dinosaur-stomped jungles, torpedo shooting submarines, dastardly deeds, and well-timed revelations. Mooney draws and quarters his story evenly across six issues with minimal loss of melodramatic pacing while maintaining his characters’ dynamics (sure, they may all be stereotypes, but they’re still well-executed stereotypes), making his story an entertaining read from start to finish within each issue.

And watching people get eaten by dinosaurs, especially nasty Nazi people, is always a pleasure for horror fans to see, of course. And watching samurai swords slice through impossible things, with maybe a neck or two in the way, is fun to see, too.

Graphic Book Review: The Sixth Gun
Sons of the Gun

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Sixth-gun-sons-of-the-gunZombos Says: Good

Four guns are unholstered for The Sixth Gun: Sons of the Gun, but this spin-off prequel story in The Sixth Gun saga misfires with its audaciously aimed showdown that pits one giant monster (we're talking 10 stories tall, here) versus cursed gunslingers to close this five issue series. Before we reach that point, a weird wild west storyline unfolds along different paths as each gun's owner brings us back to General Hume's hanging-tree demise starting point and onto their own slides down the slippery slope of perdition. 

Each gunslinger can shoot bullets drilling deeper than mere death in their targets: Arcene's bullets carry firey doom; Kinney's bullets bring flesh-rotting ruin; Hedgepeth's bullets bring forth all the souls he's killed as golem-like vassals to do his bidding; and Sumter's bullets explode like cannonballs. A formidable firepower of destruction when directed by the evil General Hume or his soon to be widowed wife, the equally evil Missy Hume. She carries a cursed gun too, but in proper female stereotyping for comic books written by the boys, she only gets a youthful long life for every person she kills with her bullets. How vain.

Sumter wields the first gun, but it doesn't do him much good as he slowly dies of thirst in the desert. A lucky break with an Arabian Nights-styled Waters of Azad fountain hidden in the air, and a pack of human wolves hungering for its treasure, saves him for worse things to come. But he likes it that way, honing his mettle for destruction as the bodies stack up.

One by one, we come to really dislike, hope for salvation, strive to understand, and finally condemn these wicked men.  What's not  probed is why they must be so bad, but bad things they must do, and there's the more engrossing tale set against a little Cthulish ghoulishness with Arcene's mama making naughty with dark, demon-hided, men deep in the swamp. She looks like the Crypt Keeper, just not as witty and a tad more churlish. Arcene's family tree certainly does show more appendages than the normal allotment for siblings. But this interlude into his questionable parentage doesn't go further than his abrupt dislike for it before we're following Kinney as he suffers the pangs of unrequited love, gun-toting guilt, and the burden of a severe physical deformity causing ordinary folks, and would-be lovers, to shun him like the plague, which he pretty much resembles. 

But a heartbeat is all we get to ponder the vagaries of his tribulation before we're following Hedgepeth and his battle with creatures infecting a small town. His gun leads him to the only solution he can figure out for the time allotted. Then off to the showdown with a plague of parasitic monstrosities that Brian Churilla's soft lines can't convey beyond a PG tone. Throat-ripping upchucked creatures, half-eaten men, they all carry as much visual gravitas as Arcene's family-gathering in the swamp. There's no oggling his pencils for emotional shock value; there isn't any where it could add to the scene's impact.

Instead, all threads within this hurried storyline, when they could easily have been separated into fully developed series indivdually, all culminate in a brief Kaiju battle more suited to a tokusatsu drama than a weird wild western. And since none of these gunslingers grows in size, like Ultraman, to meet the danger, the threat is spent with a few bullets so Missy Hume can step in and take charge to shed more blood.

Unless you've read the earlier issues of the comic book series, or the graphic book collections, you may find this one unsatisfying all by its lonesome. I'd recommend reading the others first to come up to speed before tackling this one.

Graphic Book Review: So…I Survived
The Zombie Apocalypse

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Zombie-apocalypseZombos Says: Fair

So…I Survived the Zombie Apocalypse and All I Got Was This Podcast is about perky, nubile, blond and boxom, podcasting Mara Mitchell, who loves gardening and making new friends when all her old ones are dead. All her potential new friends are dead, too, but they like it that way and don't want her company.

Cue the zombie apocalypse peppered with satirical moments as Mara is forced to leave her cozy, walled-off, townhouse when a snake bite sends her to the drug store. Only she never reaches the drug store. Instead, she finds out what's been going apocalyptic while she's been gardening and podcasting. Unfortunately, Chris W. Freeman and Korey Hunt can't make what's been going down around her as clever as the title of this graphic book. 

I'm starting to think too many writers and artists in comic books are inbreeding at an alarming rate. Here's another cool premise shot to hell with the same stereotypical sexism, the same half-baked humor without zest or visual flair, and the same character types recycled by very good, good, and not so good artists–five  too many to keep the story flowing evenly across the pages. This is the let-the-panel-do-the-talking type of graphic novel, so dialog and written narrative are sparse, but much needed to flesh out Mara and her zombie neighbors. Her zombie neighbors are all women and that's the kicker to this premise: even they can't stand her, but since they only eat the male zombies, they leave her alone. 

Until she wants to make friends, that is; first the pretend zombie dress-up for the dead party, but that doesn't go well when her nerdgirl takes charge, then it's a pissing contest between the mangy dog that can't keep its leg down, and the lady deadites against the human, leading to a full-blown Rambo onslaught when a trap is sprung with roller-skates and a mannequin. Goofy, but not smart funny; just stupid-funny. 

Mara's hookup with old chum, Lisa–she's really dead, like non-reanimated corpse dead–leads to an odd, one-sided buddy-buddy reunion. That's a little smart-funnier.  But not much.

Graphic Book Review: Dresden Files, Ghoul Goblin

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Cover38579-mediumZombos Says: Very Good

A family curse begun in Cairo, Egypt, in 1917 leads wizard Harry Dresden away from his stomping grounds in Chicago to Missouri, to face even worse danger than the sea creature in Lake Michigan that was aiming to make sushi out of him.

Writers Jim Butcher and Mark Powers complicate things nicely, cast spells neatly, and charge Dresden up with enough cold and flu medications to make his job suitably trenchcoat miserable–or rather I should make that 'inverness coat' difficult, since Dresden likes to dress old school.

With a little help from Bob the talking skull–who's a little snippy after being stuffed in a trunk for so long–and much hurting by flippant creatures vacationing from the Nevernever, the story (note for steadfast fans: it's set between Fool Moon and Grave Peril) takes turns that are bigger than those of the "ginormous" snake god that Dresden summons to provide enough cryptic information to make his job even tougher.

In between the ever explored human versus darker things versus deity indifference with the perennial battle between the two, Dresden is properly burdened with enough sweet and sour memories and good intentions to make us root for him to whip evil's ass and beat those darker things' butts good and plenty. Keeping him a few spells short of being a truly mighty wizard allows his humanity to come through as much as his bruises.

Butcher and Powers' balance of dry humor, bloody encounters, and dramatic surprises is well served by Joseph Cooper's art, which provides enough gritty detail with it's thick lines to carry the storyline to its climax. Deputy Sheriff Prescott, the cursed Talbot family, the town's mayor, the reluctant sheriff (there's always one, at least) who wants Dresden to drive his beat up Volkswagon Beetle far away in the opposite direction, and a very competitive ghoul and goblin, all of them through their characterizations, dialog, and revealed motivations and secrets make this tale a little more sophisticated in plotting and unfolding than the usual comic book series expends energy on.

Now that's quite a well casted spell, indeed.

This graphic book will be released on November 26th.

Graphic Book Review
Hellboy: The Midnight Circus

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Hellboy-midnight-circusZombos Says: Very Good

There’s magic to be found at the circus. Mischief, too. Especially when creepy clowns bang noisy drums in the middle of the night down dark, lonely roads to attract the attention of little boys. Little hellboys, that is.

Mike Mignola (story) and Duncan Fegredo (art) provide the mischief, and colorist Dave Stewart adds the sinister atmosphere in this short graphic novel that takes place when Hellboy’s too young to smoke, but old enough to be tempted to burn.

He’s also too energetic to be cooped up in the dusty confines of the Paranormal Research and Defense Headquarters, circa 1948, so he sneaks out in the dead of night to grab a puff or two. But something else is looking to grab him instead.

Also sneaking about, “from the clock strikes midnight…to the fearful crack of dawn” is a creepy circus with strange animals and stranger attractions, which would give Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show serious competition.

Enticing him into the wondrous rings of the big tent is a mysterious ringmaster with nefarious plans, and his daughter, who also has a few sinister plans of her own. Both father and daughter have a hellish time seeing eye to eye, but each one has their eyes dead set on the little red hellion with a promising future: for evil or good.

We know which way they’d like to see him go even if he doesn’t. In turn, they try to entice the little kid with the big red hand into a future potential that’s different than he or anyone else back at headquarters had thought about; except for one worrywart quoting ominous passages from books no one else is reading.

The artwork dutifully captures the mystery and the damnation while the story delivers all the circus devil-fleas and Hellboy could-bes you would expect from Mike Mignola, especially as experienced through young Hellboy’s desire to grow up faster than he really ought to.

This title will be available October 23, 2013.

Graphic Book Review: Freaks of the Heartland
Excellent Shadows, Needs More Light

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freaks of the heartland

Zombos Says: Fair

Steve Niles perfunctory story is surpassed by Greg Ruth's beautifully atmospheric panels in Dark Horse'sFreaks of the Heartland, providing the only reason to pick up this 9 x 12 inch formatted hardcover edition.

Without Ruth selling the emotional interplay between characters and setting visually, this story amounts to only an exercise in the writing of a stock situation–they're not like us so we're scared of them–of which we've seen much too much already in movies and fiction to be enamored simply because it's used. Again.

Freakish big brother with nasty eating habits chained in barn? Check. The rest of this rural community beset by freakish siblings also chained in barns or locked in storm cellars? Check. Non-freakish siblings disturbed by all this mistreatment of their brothers and sisters? Check. They ignore adults and go on the lam? Of course. The adults squabble among each other as to how to deal with the situation thereby making it worse? Check and double check.

Adding fire-breathing to the mix doesn't tally to originality either, and ending this weakly plotted story abruptly (a major problem with many comic book driven stories), eclipses the plotline backstory–what caused all these freakish births and why?–that Niles ignores.

Instead, he rests on his laurels by using the villagers-lighting-torches and the children-will-save-them action scenes. Is he good at using them? Yes. But good writers abound in digital and print and many of them actually have new stories with fresh ideas to tell. There's nothing in Freaks of the Heartland, beyond Niles' name attached to it and Ruth's stellar ink and watercolor storyboard, that warrants our admiration, or being optioned off for animation or a live-action movie adaptation. Unless they go with animation;  they could follow Ruth's lead and captivate us with illustration. But whoever adapts the story will have a lot to fill in. Freaks of the Heartland is only a chapter when it should be a novel.

And yes, I find that galling. 

So many talented writers are out there struggling while Niles knocks off safe horror pablum for the fanboys who swoon at his feet. Enough swooning already. Get off your butt Niles and work for that paycheck. 

Graphic Book Review: Evelyn Evelyn

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Evelyn_evelyn_dark horseZombos Says: Excellent

Call it a glum child adult's fairytale or a morose adult child's fairytale, Evelyn Evelyn: A Tragic Tale in Two Tomes from Dark Horse is quite intoxicatingly real in it's grotesque fiction. It is darkened parquetry, laid across the pages of two small tomes bordered by slipcase, revealing the piquant story of the conjoined Neville sister twins' never existence, from birth to YouTube stardom, embellished with gross exploitation, tearful misfortune, and their eventual, but tenuous, music salvation.

The tartly sweet baroque illustrations by Cynthia von Buhler are all coffin frills and funeral lace and purple ribbons heavily blushed by somber Autumn colors and impossibly tragical events. This is the bedtime story Wednesday Addams would want to fall asleep to, people'd to absurdity, dusted lightly with caked talcum and caressed softly by razor sharp tinsel.  

Their caretakers, Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley, musically gifted in their own right, have preserved the fragile confidence of the twins enough to bring their melancholic artfulness to light, as well as their bittersweet, decidedly corkscrew journey that starts with a detrimental birth in a medically-modified Airstream trailer,  necessary salvation from a chainsaw-wielding doctor of dubious reputation and errant skills, unnecessary loss to a chicken farmer who coops them like his chickens, and questionable rescue by candy-wielding saviors who bring them to live at a shady home for wayward girls, where VHS tapes and debauchery mix and 13 year-olds mysteriously leave for parts unknown, late at night.

Elephant Elephant, the two-headed elephant, their only friend in the circus where they must perform, provides surcease of misfortune until misfortune insists, but the inseparable and resourceful sisters use the wonder of technology and the closeness of the  Internet to garner notoriety with their ukulele and fragile gumption; sure in the knowledge that, no matter what travails they face, through thick or thin they will never split up and go their separate ways.

Endearing, frightening, and perplexing, in Evelyn Evelyn, the truth is stranger than reality, and far more cheeky.

Graphic Book Review: Cowboys and Aliens
Saddle-sore Adventure

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Cowboysaliens Zombos Says: Fair

Miss Verity: This doesn't look good, Zeke.
Zeke: Nope, it don't.

After seeing the movie trailer I have high hopes for Cowboys and Aliens. The only reason Western Sci Fi hasn't worked in Hollywood is Hollywood.

Simple ideas can get overly complicated and cluttered with witless additions in the process of making a movie (like Sonnenfeld's unpalatable Wild, Wild, West); and demanding ideas get simplified and sanitized, losing nuance and subtlety important for defining the story (the remake of The Haunting, for instance).

The challenge presented to Cowboys and Aliens is taking the bland, uninspired graphic novel it's based on, with its single bold idea, and building it into an inspired movie. There's a lot to go wrong if Hollywood thinks a few big name actors will be able to carry this premise seriously, and with integrity, without a good script. Worse, still, if they stick to the graphic novel.

Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley's Cowboys and Aliens avoids the rich culture and ambiance of the Western, choosing instead to fanboy the characters, simplify the dialog, and rush through simplistic, threadbare situations. Names like Zeke, Miss Verity, and Shaman Skunk Belly may have fanboys grinning, but it will be a hard sell on the big screen if these characters don't go deeper than this.

Luciano Lima's artwork, devoid of period detail and subtlety, brings no panache to the novel. The exciting cover showing a cowboy squarely aiming at an alien ship overhead, his horse running at full gallop, shows an energy and a situation that doesn't appear in the story. A tacked on prologue, drawn by Dennis Calero, promises sophistication the rest of the novel fails to sustain. It compares the alien colonization of other worlds to the American Indian's displacement by settlers; but this deep-seated, tone-setting theme is glossed-over in the story.

Zeke and Miss Verity are fighting off Indians attacking a wagon train the two of them are escorting in the opening panels. This quaint staple of most early television westerns is interrupted by an alien ship crash landing nearby. The aliens decide to claim the planet, the Indians and settlers decide otherwise. Alien technology conveniently becomes usable by Zeke, and not much time is spent on the expected disbelief-giving-way-to-plausible-acceptance of alien creatures suddenly appearing with magical gadgets. As to be expected, the ending leaves franchise possibilities open.

Clearly, the promising idea of cowboys and Indians and aliens mixing it up in the Old West sold. Now the question is, can the movie sell the idea to its audience?

Graphic Book Review: Eeek!
Retro-Horror Not At Its Best

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Eeek Zombos Says: Fair

The cover of Asylum Press' Eeek!, Volume 1, is the most exciting page in this largely vacuous collection of the first 4 issues of Jason Paulos' retro-stylized horror comic book series. Luckily, for those of us who grew up on the gaudy and gnarly visuals and storylines of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s horror comics and magazines, this volume is neither a representative homage or attentive aping of those delightfully unsavory and sardonically witty nightmares delivered each month to the local drugstore and luncheonette: a blessing to every kid and a bane to every parent.

Out of 16 stories drawn, and mostly written, by Jason Paulos, with additional scripting by Daren White and Bodine Amerikah, Just Desserts, Colour Me Evil, Head Trip, Thrill Killer, and Six Digit Disaster (Daren White), read as complete stories. What do I mean by a complete story? That's simple: it's a story with a beginning, middle, and ending that ties it all together, for the better or worse of its characters. Incomplete stories peter out like a dud firecracker that fizzles instead of blowing up, or muddles the flow of actions and reactions into a tangle, like sloppy editing in a movie creates confusion. This volume has too many duds with tangles.

The remaining tangled 11 stories are either too long, with a lackluster or incoherent payoff: Easy Prey; Witness to Evil; Deadline of Death; Like Mother, Like Son; Death Wears Hotpants; or too short and whimper to an ending hardly worth the effort: Stuffed; Lights, Camera, Murder!; What's Down In the Basement Horace Greeley? Typos here and there pour additional salt into this bleeding mess.

Eek7 Paulos' artwork is clever and much better than his writing, although he seems to have a limited bag of panel tricks at his disposal to vary his style across stories. Just Desserts comes closest to that delicious sense of moldy candy and grisly surprise often found in retro-horror fare, both in story and especially how he handles its buildup, panel by panel. Head Trip provides an unsettling one for us as well as its main victim with its stylish acid trip funky bordering around scenes and its record-playing Music of Erich Zann dynamic. The Undertaker and Cryptoe: Death Can be Fatal is a zany romp of Bernie Wrightsonesque mayhem until the unimaginative punchline ending kills the fun.

In these types of stories, Paulos' male and female characters look similar, but he still manages to add enough characterization to faces and bodily motions to provide that off-kilter, sourly whimsical look of 1950s and 1970s horror. (Bernie Wrightson excels at it.)

Thirteen pages of Asylum adverts, an unnecessary gallery of hodgepodge art, and a welcome full-color set of Eeek! covers pad out the remaining pages. The numerous glowing promotional quotes on the back of the book fooled me into picking this one up without paging through it first. My first new year's resolution is to ignore them from now on. You should, too. There is a glimmer of wonderful here, but only a glimmer.

Graphic Book Review: Lenore, Cooties

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Lenore_cooties_color. ZC Rating: 5 of 7  (Excellent)

Lenore, the cute little dead girl, springs to vivid life, in full color, in Cooties. This Titan Books hardcovered, colorized edition of Roman Dirge’s comic book series collects issues 9 through 12. Here’s how I can best describe Dirge’s misadventures for his adorable, rotten-stuffin’, googly-eyed waif.

What if Dennis the Menace were a girl living next door to the Addams Family? He’d be, she’d be Lenore.

What if Eddie Munster had an incredible two-headed transplant with Dennis the Menace and dressed like Wednesday from the Addams Family? He’d, they’d be Lenore.

What if the Brady Bunch and the Beeve–after spending summer vacation at 1313 Mockingbird Lane– went through an ion storm filled with screwed up cosmic rays, while locked in the trunk of the Jupiter 2, that was being towed at sub-warp speed by the U.S.S Enterprise NCC-1701, which was being trapped by a Tholian Web? They’d be Lenore’s friends.

What if you read this book and didn’t find it funny as hell in that morbid, cockamamie sick sense of humor way horror fans tend to exhibit? Impossible.

Lenore’s endearing charm, even if worms are boring through her cranium now and then, and she surrounds herself with festering friends, comes from her irresistible, child-like sense of what’s most important: like leaving the afterlife because it’s itchy and smells a lot like Fritos and making a death mask for fun.

In Cooties, her friends, who (gramma’ nazis, feel free to insert whom here) wear more than clothes, dig her up, which leads to Pooty the bounty hunter–aside from being little, I can’t make heads or tails what he is–being sent to bring her back to the afterlife. Much mayhem ensues as he fails in his mission, causing a slubby netherworld army to be sent instead. Of course, with Lenore, much mayhem ensues daily anyway.

In-between this continuing turmoil, Dirge tosses in a few heaping helpings of grue like Pop Goes the Weasel (the weasel does, really), and his own strange encounter with a talking urinal in Japan (believe me, I know, I’ve been there). Copious pin-ups, issue covers, and I-can’t-believe-he-actually-did-that moments stretch the boundaries of good taste and decorum. Dirge will spare no cliche, no oft-turned phrase, no sordid joke or crass visceral visual to make Lenore as banana ripe and cheeky as the day before she died.

Neil Gaiman supplies the foreword. He’s strange, too.

Titan Books supplied a courtesy copy for this review. I already have the black and white comic book issues, though, so this is icing on the cake, for sure.

Lenore_strip_002

 

Graphic Book Review: American Vampire Vol 1

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Pearl Zombos Says: Very Good

Here's what vampires shouldn't be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys and only work at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls; boy-toys with big dewy eyes.

What should they be?

Killers, honey…(from the introduction by Stephen King)

There are bloodthirsty killers and blood-drained dead aplenty in the hardcover edition of American Vampire from Vertigo. It collects the first 5 issues of vibrantly colored panel-stretching art from Rafael Albuquerque and colorist Dave McCaig, detailing the two side by side stories that tell the death and times of the American-made vampire, Skinner Sweet. Cover art, sample script pages, and a foreward by King and afterword by Snyder are also included.

I was surprised to see how concise Scott Snyder and Stephen King's script pages are. Comprised mostly of dialog, they leave ample room for Alburquerque's interpretive embellishments with visual characterization to imbue emotional energy into each panel.  Snyder's story begins in 1925 Los Angeles where Pearl and Hattie, two yearning-for-stardom actors in Hollywood, become intimately acquainted with the blood-thirsty–thirstier than usual, anyway–movie moguls running the studio. Stephen King's story begins in the 1800s to tell how Sweet's taste for sweet candy turns to the sour-sweet taste for warm blood.

0031_001King's writing stands out for its cussing, brutal killings as Sweet takes revenge on lawman Jim Book, and for narrator Will Bunting, a newsman who was there at the time. Bunting wrote a dime novel about it called Bad Blood. We meet him when he's promoting the reprinting of his book at the Sagebrush Bookstore. Three people are in attendance–two are awake–as he recounts the truth behind his "fictional" tale.

Old World European vampires running the rails, tired of Sweet's train robberies, run afoul of Sweet's ill-temperament and newly- acquired abilities, which include walking in sunlight, long razor sharp claws with the strength to wield them,  and an expanding jaw with pointy fangs. Compared to the Euro-vamps, Sweet is a wolf to their sheep.

And he knows it.

Between the Wild West and the Roaring Twenties, Sweet does turn sweeter. Or so it seems. He helps Pearl deal with the Old World European vampires running the studio and then mosy's on his way. Hints to his main weakness and unfinished business he's hankering to tidy up are left with us to roll our own on until we meet up with him again along Snyder and King's revitalizing vampire series trail.

I've got dibs on Brad Pitt playing Sweet in the big screen version.

 A courtesy copy of American Vampire: Volume 1 was received for this review.