The Avathoir/wallflower American Vampire Conversation
Installment 11: Götterdammerung

Warning: spoilers through issue 5 of American Vampire, Second Cycle

Avathoir: Oh boy oh boy, it’s here. We did it. After almost two whole years of work, maybe even three, we have finally done it. We have made it to the Second Cycle. Where we last left off seemed a wonderful ending, bleak yet bittersweet, the culmination of where Skinner and Pearl had been heading since their first fateful meeting. So when the Second Cycle was announced skepticism of course follows: where could Snyder and Albuquerque go after this? How? There were unanswered questions, of course, with Felicia’s status as The Chosen One, whatever Jasper is, what happened to Mimiteh in the cave, and of course at the very end before it was all done whatever the Gray Trader is. But if Snyder wanted to drop those and wrap it all up, he would have made his mark. So where did we end up? 

Well, it’s the 1960s. Pearl has moved back home. Skinner is now an Easy Rider drug runner. Felicia and Gus are off doing their own thing, as is Travis. Calvin is now the head of the VMS. But though it sounds kind of lame, I actually think the eleven issues that make up this cycle are the best of the series, and probably of Snyder’s accomplished career. wallflower, your thoughts?

wallflower: So far, what this feels like is the second season of a great TV series.  The first season has a lot of energy, a lot of invention, but not a lot of discipline, and it shouldn’t.  You don’t always know what works and what doesn’t until you try and fail with at least some of it.  In the second season, though, the creators can come in with full knowledge; they don’t need to experiment any more.  Lost, Buffy, The Shield, even The West Wing all did this, ran second seasons that were completely confident and well-structured around a single story.  Snyder and Albuquerque have started that right away; the Second Cycle has launched something intense and focused, and like all the TV shows I mentioned, it’s something existential.  The Devil comes into the game here.

This Cycle announces itself as something different right away.  Cycle One ran to around forty issues; this is one-quarter of that.  There’s not the same kind of engagement with American history here, and that actually comes as a bit of a shock.  We’ve seen so much detail and metaphor that to have it go away makes this feel fundamentally different, like a rebooted series.  (In that sense, it’s like like the jump between seasons three and four of Lost, still the best job I’ve ever seen of a series reinventing itself.)  These are recognizably the same characters (particularly Pearl and Skinner) but the stakes have jumped to a new level.  Last, and most intriguing, Albuquerque has subtly changed his artwork.  The lines are less wild and jagged, and the characters are more realistic.  If we go by Scott McCloud’s triangle in Understanding Comics, his style has moved closer to the bottom, away from abstraction.  It’s strange to say this about a work where the horror is even wilder than before, but the style actually heightens the stakes.  This isn’t a horror story any more, and it’s not a myth of America.  This is real.

The teases of the Gray Trader and of the nameless vampire’s visions at the end of the last Cycle pay off here.  The Trader comes off as pure Lovecraftian horror, an all-devouring mouth, and its bite transforms and possesses its victims.  (The bite marks turn into more mouths; this calls up Lovecraft and the Cloverfield monster.  Lovecraft himself will briefly become part of the plot in issue five, so Snyder clearly knew what he was doing here.)  Like all great horror, it’s an image that has so much psychological and mythological resonance, like we always knew this was waiting for us.  We’ve seen elements of this before (the ancient statue that turned out to be a vamp in the Nazi-hunting episode) but Snyder and Albuquerque go all in here.  Having Pearl fight a child that’s turned into a demon while we see Cal voiceovering “Pearl!  I’m talking about the first monster!  The original drop of blood!”–that is some classic horror material.

Avathoir: Lovecraft is for sure an influence in this chapter, what with the mouths everywhere and the mouths also being giant and this primordial evil that Snyder’s introduced. It’s surprising to a degree how much Snyder has stepped up the power scale here: everything feels so much bigger, like he took the ideas of the Dracula arc with different breeds and an original monster they all have to confront and amplified it. But while Drac was something like an assimilator, the Trader is closer to an Almighty opponent, less a mind controller than someone who beats opposing minds into the shit. I mean, how else to explain how easy all of this is for him? Drac can barely get out of his coffin. The Trader strolls.

You’re right about how different Albuquerque’s art is here as well. The style is much less animated, for lack of a better term. It’s washed out in a few spots, like paper you’ve left in the sun for so long it starts to bleach. Amazingly enough, it’s an approach that works: we get the feeling rather than being swept up in something like the first cycle that we’re instead in a sort of dazed trance, a twilit horror where the monsters are visible but not enough (and too much) to be truly scary.

Monsters in general are a much bigger concern for Snyder then what we’ve seen before. The previous Cycle was all about how humans are monsters, while this one is a lot less subtle about what they look like. Let’s consider what kind of things we’ve seen so far: in addition to the Gray Trader swallowing things up like he was a version of Kirby from hell, we’ve seen giant monsters that breed mouths upon mouths upon mouths whenever they get hurt, invisible bat monsters that tear like a thousand tiny knives into their targets, and the…THINGS that live underneath the ground.

Which reminds me: I want to come back to a particular moment (which I feel is the best scene in the entire two cycles, and the greatest thing Snyder has ever written in terms of emotion), but before that I want to take a look at issue 5, in which the young Bunting (who so narrowly avoided his death the last time we saw him) looks as if he’s actually bit the big one this time as he gets caught in the ravine where the Gray Trader had been hiring miners many decades beforehand. This issues, perhaps simply by the virtue of its format, is the closest we’ve ever really gotten to remembering Snyder’s previous career in prose. There’s whole pages without any illustrations, instead immaculate lettering, like a manuscript from the Victorian era. It’s a great bit of playing with the form, which Snyder seems more open to do in general.

wallflower, you’ve talked about art and tone and genre a bit, but what do you think of things like this? Things where form and character get played with more than they usually would. I’m not saying that the First Cycle didn’t have the same depth as this one, but Snyder is willing to dive into psychology a bit more on this Cycle, I find. What do you think of the reintroductions of our leads, what they’re doing now with their lives, and how the story has changed to accommodate how they’ve changed?

wallflower:  With Pearl, she’s become in her way what she couldn’t be with Henry, a mom.  She takes in orphan vampires and gosh they are cute.  Seriously, the page where they’re introduced and talk about their different lineages is a new and funny tone here, not satire, just play.  (I kept thinking of the scene in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman where we get to see the Endless as kids.)  That takes a skid into something else, though, as we see Pearl has been tracking the genealogy of the vamps (with “Original Infection?” at the top) and then one of her kids reveals the bite mark and everything starts to get very dark, in color and story.  This role feels right for Pearl; she has grown older in this way:  she has truly accepted who and what she is.  She couldn’t live in an eternal marriage with Henry because she was a vampire and he wasn’t, and her story in Cycle One was to accept that.  Here, she can be the protector and guide to a new generation of vamps.  Late last cycle, the VMS said that the battle wouldn’t be between humans and vamps, but against evil, and that battle is here.

Skinner has gone outlaw, because of course he has.  He’s “Sugar Man,” hijacking drugs and weapons and riding a sweet bike (which we dare not insult) and still asking motherfuckers if they’ve got any candy.  He’s also using a sunken train car from the 1800s as a hideout, and it’s both a reminder of his earlier life and something that feels like one of the meth labs on Breaking Bad.  Pearl has moved forward, but Skinner has regressed, back to the lifestyle and the sentences he had before.  This could have been a problem–after everything he’s been through, it would be more interesting to see a change in him.  Snyder and especially Albuquerque make it work, though, because we do get a change:  for the first time, Skinner comes up against something that makes him afraid.  Albuquerque gives him panels where we’re looking right at him, and we’ve never seen that look before.  Snyder pays this idea off in plot, too:  at the end of issue 4, Skinner has been bitten and infected.

Almost perversely, that sets up issue 5, where we break from the story and go back into recent action (young Bunting on what looks like his final mission, but you’re not fooling me again, Snyder) and then past action via the journal you mentioned.  This is something that comics do so well and don’t do often enough:  mix genres right on the page.  (Watchmen has still done the best job of this.)  Snyder and a new artist (Matias Bergara) run a two-track story here, one told through William Dodgeman’s journals (we learn they were held by Lovecraft himself for a while), the other the story of Bunting searching for and descending to the mine where Dodgeman worked, and which might now contain some serious evil.

The journal itself is a kind of comic, with illustrations; the early one of “Joseph Pell,” the mine operator (and possibly vamp?), looking directly at us, comes off as classically foreboding.  The journal plays by the single-revelation rule of short horror stories, a quick journey to something really scary.  Here, it’s not so much the revelation that Pell’s “wife” births some kind of evil into the ground, but that no one is going to make it out alive.  The last page of the journal, with a self-portrait of Dodgeman and the line “This was my face.” written over and over, is existentially compelling; it evokes a fear not just that you’re going to die but your identity will be wiped out.  Two pages later in the actual comic, we find that’s exactly what happened.  Going back to your comment about the psychological depth here, so many things contribute to the feeling of dread that goes through this Cycle.  The toned-down look, the focus on mythology rather than history (although I’m pretty sure Cal has a picture of Robert Johnson with the Gray Trader), the question of lost identity, all of these raise the stakes to something past violence or even death.

This story has such momentum; like the second seasons I mentioned before, it’s stripped down and each incident–even the ones like issue 5 that go into the past–keep escalating.  We’ve talked about psychology here; what do you think of the storytelling?  Cycle One went in so many directions; is the straight-ahead plot a good mode for Snyder?  And what have been some of your favorite moments so far?

Avathoir: It’s time to talk about the moment I feel is Snyder’s opus, the scene he wrote that will get him into Heaven, should he need to defend his life Albert Brooks style. I speak of course of the end of issue three. Having gotten pissed at Skinner (for like the millionth time) for swearing a promise as a former Confederate soldier, Pearl goes outside, frustrated and sick and tired of everything and trying to hold it together, and then she hears it. 

The singing. Henry’s singing. We’ve seen the Trader mask his voice before, knowing things he cannot possibly know (which is likely a form of telepathy). He sings the very same song that Henry used to propose to Pearl. In his voice, slowly approaching her in silhouette, so that it looks like Henry really is back. After all Pearl has gone through, showing her how much she’s grown, in an instant she reverts back to her mental state in The Blacklist, where she was perpetually on the verge of either tears or murder.

Then the tears come, and it’s the best drawing Albuquerque has ever done. A perfect representation of the joy, fear, and loneliness that comes from a situation like this. And she’s so close to taking the Trader’s hand when he fucks up.

And then Pearl comes back to her senses. “Get the fuck off my land.” She says, and she’s back, ready to be the person she promised she would be, and it’s beautiful.

The Robert Johnson panel is real, which is something I hope gets explained in the Anthology how Johnson wasn’t eaten by the Trader, and I adore Skinner’s going Grim Reaper with the scythe and everything that has to do with Gentry. Both of them are moments that are instrumental in understanding how much King is an influence on Snyder: the almost absurd moments that lurk within horror, how audacity somehow doesn’t act as a relief but another shade to the proceedings. I mean, it’s one thing to have a rescue via shotgun. It’s another thing when your savior is wearing a hilariously tacky suit and using Hank Williams’ shotgun.

So, before we break until we get into the second half of the story (I was very tempted to have you read issue 6, just because so much of what just happened is explained and it serves as such a great cliffhanger) I want to ask you what some of your favorite moments were, as well as what you think things like Skinner’s infection, Pearl’s new resolve, and Calvin’s realizing he’s the only one here who is anything close to sane are going to mean. Also, have you missed Felicia and company so far this arc? Why do you feel Snyder has kept them offstage so far?

wallflower: Oh man, Gentry was my favorite part of this too, using those tacky suits as a DEFCON signal to the VMS.  The only way it could have been better if it was Vegas-period Elvis doing it, but the time frame just isn’t right for that.  Horror already plays in the absurd, so why not pile on some funny while you’re at it?

Coming back to that scene with Pearl and not-Henry:  you’re right, it’s so moving.  Interestingly, Snyder doesn’t play it as anything but Pearl’s temptation; Henry stays off to the side, in shadow, and we’ve seen that the Trader comes to people with the voice of figures from their past.  So we know this isn’t real, and Pearl only has that one moment where she feels it is.  What makes it not just moving, but thematically right, is how it reverses the Pearl/Henry relationship; now “he” is the one who says come be like me and we can be together always.  Like him, she doesn’t take it.  Albuquerque’s facial work is so good here:  again, he’s not going as expressionistic as before, but he still conveys such a strong range of Pearl’s emotions shifting here.  The force of this sequence is almost entirely in her face.

I didn’t miss Felicia and company at all here, because Snyder isn’t trying to world-build in this Cycle, he’s telling a story and following the principle of “anything that isn’t necessary gets thrown out.”  For us readers, world-building creates the anticipation of “what will we learn next?” and storytelling creates “what will they do next?”  Cycle One set so much groundwork that we don’t need to know anymore, and the stakes got believably and irrevocably raised in the first issue here.  King has been an influence (literally a co-author, too) all through American Vampire, and now we have a showdown like the back third of The Stand.  Let’s go.   

Please tune in next time for American Vampire Conversation 12: The Darkest Before the Dawn