American Vampire #16

"Ghost War," Part Four
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque

War makes strange bedfellows.  The Japanese prison facility darkening Taipan turns out, quite unsurprisingly, to be less a detention center than an occult science base, weapons development in vampire infection.  Their latest casualty:  Sam Lants, a weapons specialist who finds himself in a pit with a vampire land mine, loaded with shrapnel and Taipan vampire blood.

How exactly, or if, the Japanese army controls this feral breed remains unexplained.  They keep them caged at the prison, but they seem to show no fear of them wandering around the island.  Half of Taipan is, after all, under Japanese military control, the other half American.  They have, in other words, weaponized vampires, and any good soldier needs to know how to use his weapon.

Henry Preston, as it turns out, has quite the instinct for vampire hunting, and, of course, impressive caution and discretion as well.  He might never have met Skinner Sweet before the boat from Hawai'i, but he caught his scent right away.  To Henry's enduring credit, he plays along with Sweet's fiction, treating him like any other American soldier lost and wounded on the island, not only because he isn't entirely certain Skinner is a vampire, but also because he's honorable enough to wait it out.  In a troop of vampire hunters, the only one to recognize the vampire is the man who sleeps next to a vampire every night.

And so, trapped in a Japanese research prison, reduced to half their original crew, on the eve of the first field test of the vampire bomb on U.S. troops stationed on Taipan, Henry Preston and Skinner Sweet—along with Vicar Row and Calvin Poole—strike an unconventional alliance.  Preston offers Sweet his blood, a chance to regain his strength after the devastating attack by the Taipan vampires, and together they'll make their escape.  When Sweet snarls in the issue's closing splash, "Semper Fi, Motherfuckers!" (American Vampire, Volume 3: 116 [American Vampire #16: 20]), it rings with Sweet's characteristic irony.  It is simultaneously a cynical and defiant parody of military loyalty and allegiance and strangely truthful.  Against almost all expectation, Sweet is oddly a man of his word.  Semper Fi, indeed.

[August 2011]

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