American Vampire #12

"Strange Frontier"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Danijel Zezelj

It takes only a few short decades—some of which Skinner Sweet spent buried in a coffin at the bottom of a reservoir—for the American West to become the stuff of mythology.  The lingering remnants, displaced and left behind as their world disappeared into a modernized twentieth century of increasing urbanism and nationwide expansion, are aging shells of themselves.  By 1919, they're attempting to capitalize on their reputations and the mystique of the fading West in a two-bit side-show led by rich Yankee Colonel Seldom French—Frenchie, to Sweet—who made his own fortune selling Buffalo coats.  They've re-written their own histories to appeal to the popular, romanticized Wild West.  Sweet finds himself one day in the crowd, watching a Broadway actor reenact his own (obviously inaccurate) demise at the hands of Jim Book.  Spurred by the insult of the inaccuracy and probably his own mischievous personality, Sweet makes real the pageant in front of him, loading their guns with real gunpowder and bullets and rekindling their own bitter histories with one another.

It would be a fine but otherwise uninteresting retelling of Sweet's past if it weren't for two things:  his drug-clouded reunion with former lover, brothel madam, and betrayer Kitty Banks, and his remembrance of old enemy Jim Book.  Sweet, it seems, is as protectively nostalgic and oddly honorable as Frenchie is exploitative.  Sweet may take his own place in the show's cast after decapitating his counterpart, but it's his defense of the memory of Jim Book as he attacks his show-double that's a bit startling:  "You don't deserve to wear Jim Book's name!" (American Vampire, Volume 3: 13 [American Vampire #12: 10]).  Sweet's nemesis had always borne his animosity, but also apparently his respect.

Kitty Banks, by the time Sweet finds her, is far gone and faded into an opium daze.  He comes to her like a ghost lover in a dream.  He's come to kill her after overhearing about her treachery, tipping off Felix Camillo, but he finds she'd intended it as a gift, a blaze of glory worthy of his legend, and she'd meant to die with him.  Unlike Sweet, she felt the noose tightening around the West, saw the writing on the wall.  Having just seen it for himself, Sweet understands, and in a moment of tenderness unmatched by anything we've seen from him—except perhaps some of his moments with Pearl, Kitty's successor—he kisses her and leaves her to her die in her "dream."

[April 2011]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 3 (ISBN: 978-1401233334)