American Vampire #5

Chapter Five:  "Curtain Call" and "If Thy Right Hand Offend Thee..."
written by Scott Snyder and Stephen King
art by Rafael Albuquerque


However pervasive, action sequences are difficult to do right in comics.  They always seem stiffer than on film and thinner than the quieter, more verbal moments.  Relatedly, it's very difficult to right action dialogue without sounding like a throw-back to bad puns, cheesy one-liners and empty bravado.  Pearl's revenge on her European vampire attackers and her back-stabbing best friend and roommate Hattie shows just how well they can be done.  Snyder's set-up—a meditation on the natural hierarchy of predators and the delusional overconfidence of the vampire movie moguls—is very fine, but his best move is stepping out of the way to let Rafael Albuquerque's artwork tell the tale.  The details of the scene—including the dismembered and perhaps still living body of a young woman, their cache of bladed weaponry, and their pleasure in boasting of their earlier tortures—showcase the vampires' hubristic sadism.  But it's her more personal revenge on Hattie, the vampires' new starlet and a popular embodiment of the American desire for instant celebrity and validation, that is truly satisfying.  Just as Hattie's meteoric rise is on its surface the realization of the American Dream, the reality of her "break" is a more faithful representation:  self-promotion at the expense of others, spurred by jealousy and competitive friendship, and the willingness to achieve success at any cost.

Pearl's final scenes on the boardwalk with Henry, whom it is exciting to see collaborating in Pearl's earlier revenge, is a fine and gentle moment for a character whose recent actions could threaten to change her nature as well as her form in ways more cruel than I would like.  It, in some ways, validates her earlier actions by reinforcing that she is, in fact, still Pearl.  It's also a fine moment for Skinner Sweet, who once again manages to make honesty both charming and menacing.

Jim Book is the other side of Pearl's coin, the only other person Sweet has been known to turn.  Unlike Pearl, who has reluctantly but successfully embraced Sweet's transformation, Book resists it for over three years, barely surviving on groundhogs and sheep, trying large-scale transfusions and blood treatments to cure his condition.  Finally, he enlists Abilena, his former partner's daughter, to help him kill himself.  She agrees on the condition that he impregnate her, continuing a cycle of inherited revenge, handed down from one generation to the next.  Sweet, it seems, may outlive his enemies, but not his injustices.

[September 2010]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 1 (ISBN 978-1401228309)