American Vampire #6

"Devil in the Sand," Part One
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque

Leave it to Skinner Sweet to monetize vice in the most notorious party city in the United States at the very inception of its reputation.  You could even say Sweet lent Las Vegas its character.  Just over ten years after turning Pearl and taking down several Hollywood moguls, Skinner Sweet has set up as a brothel owner in Las Vegas' red light district, a city once relatively small and obscure made bigger and famous by the construction of Hoover Dam (olim Boulder Dam) twenty-five miles to the southeast and the economy of gambling, drinking and whoring that blossomed to entertain its massive workforce.

Enter Cashel McCogan, newly minted chief of police following the untimely death of his father the former police chief, father-to-be, and increasingly frustrated citizen of the growing metropolis.  He already has a history of run-ins with Sweet, whom he knows as Mr. Smoke and whom he suspects of orchestrating his father's murder.  If opening sequence in Colorado is anything to go on, he will have at least one more bloody confrontation with the vampire, one that leaves his as-yet unborn child a vampire himself.  And re-enter Felicia Book, daughter of Jim Book and Abilena Camillo and now assistant to FBI agent Jack Straw, both of whom seem fully aware of the existence of vampires and are readily capable of identifying their handiwork.

Interestingly, McCogan and Sweet receive similar artistic treatment.  They've got similar coloring, handsome facial features (even if McCogan lacks the sinister snarl Sweet achieves), comparable builds, and the same hat casting the same shadows out of which their eyes seem to pierce through.  The similarities are so convincing that I wasn't certain at first that the figure with the baby wasn't in fact Sweet himself.

[October 2010]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 2 (ISBN 978-1401230692)