The Avathoir/wallflower American Vampire Conversation, Installment 12: Vampires in Space!
As with all these Conversations, SPOILERS ahead.
wallflower: The second half of the Second Cycle pulls a classic storytelling move: we get the Shit Just Got Real moment (Skinner infected at the end of issue 4), an extended flashback so we all go AAAAAAAAA JUST TELL US (issue 5), and issue 6 drops the exposition-bomb on us. Pearl, Skinner, and Calvin head to the last outpost of the VMS and get captured, and the last remnants of the VMS (including Felicia Book) explain just what they’re up against, and the origin of the Gray Trader.
Turns out “Gray Trader” is a linguistic corruption. He’s actually the Great Traitor, Hurin, the first vampire killer of the first demon (first dragon, really) and he got captured and turned some thirteen thousand years ago. Which, from a mythological standpoint, is just brilliant and necessary. The theme of “curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” has been going all through both Cycles, with the additional hook that people can be biologically undercover and double agents. Snyder takes the plot element of betrayal and connects it to the vampiric aspect of “turning,” and that thematically unifies the entire story. Note that the GT always wants people or vamps to join him first; killing is the second option, and a lesser one for him. Felicia sez “like a virus, all it wants to do is spread and conquer.” (Again, an idea that Guillermo del Toro has been playing out in The Strain.) Now we know what we’re up against, and the battle gets joined.
I’m afraid that’s where this Cycle runs into some crippling structural problems. The speed of the first half of it becomes a defect here, because the biggest problem of the second half is that Snyder bogs the action down in exposition. The first Cycle had some great action interspersed with developing the backstory and the world, and I’d felt that we had enough to just drop into a breathless chase here for the second. Issue 6 was all we needed, but the next issues just keep explaining and explaining when we need to move forward. It’s even a problem on a technical level, with the panels getting more and more crowded with speech balloons with none of the elegance of issue 5. It wasn’t bad, and I kept reading, but it would have worked better if we’d gotten less information or gotten it earlier.
There’s still a lot to like here; there always is, and we’ll get to it. Over to you, though–what were your overall feelings and reactions to this? I know you wanted to hear my reaction to the reveal of the GT, which was pretty much “awwwwwwww yeah, that’s some tasty myth.” What was yours?
Avathoir: Judging by your comments I’m going to say your complaints are more structure and pacing based, which are entirely justifiable in regards to Snyder’s work, as he’s obviously shackled to some ideas based in prose, such as “hey why don’t I just expand this one idea for a few pages and have people just talk about it or philosophize at length or whatever”. I feel this whole section plays a lot better if read in one solid marathon, but it IS hindered by prose. I think Snyder tried to make it shorter, but this was the best he could do.
If you were complaining about the plot after issue 6, I have only this to say: You are RIDICULOUS if that is the case. This is where Snyder in terms of plot reaches new heights that he had only hinted at, and hits the gearshift for the series. What was once one thing is now something very different, and the series is better for it as we realize what we thought American Vampire was (an American retelling of the vampire myth, attempting to free it from European influence) is actually something else: A historical-fantasy, which is a genre I don’t ever think has been attempted before outside the works of people like Gene Wolfe. Even something like Harry Potter distinctly tries to keep the real world and the supernatural segregated, but Snyder instead polymerizes them. We are in a world where everything completely proceeds as normal but at the same time 13,000 years ago a giant worm-dragon spawned vampire soldiers as well. That’s fucking awesome.
But yeah, we have to talk about the plot developments that have happened, and the way plot is being manipulated in this story: Like with Jasper’s introduction, we’ve been given a fakeout scene, in this case Gus being in a post apocalyptic timeline, and with Agent Bixby finally having snapped and joined the GT. We also finally learn what happened to Mimiteh (that poor woman, finally coming out of her cave only to be enslaved), and why Skinner is so important, being the latest of the main bloodlines. At the end of the story we’ve come into a couple major developments: we learn that the only thing that can kill GT and the Beast is what appears to be an Angel (which Hurin used to be) and Skinner, having survived his infection, has lost the ability to become a vampire as a result. What do these further implications tell you about where we’ve come from and what we’ve discovered, not to mention where we’re going (which according to Snyder is Egypt with Gus and Travis followed by the series’ conclusion, which is going to be an Omen style thriller)?
wallflower: you’re right that the problems here are about structure, not plot; writing on The Killing, I made the distinction that plot is what happens, structure is how we find out what happens. Remember how I said last time that this Cycle stays away from history for the most part? WRONG; Snyder now pitches the entire Cold War as a coverup for pursuing the Beast, and like you said, locates vampires as something behind all of human history since just before the rise of “sedentary civilization.” I like your term historical-fantasy for this, since what he’s doing is creating a different grand narrative for, um, the entirety of the human story. Other good examples of this genre are the film Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit), John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (which is an explicit homage to it), and The X-Files, although it never attempted the rigor of the other works. History isn’t the setting anymore here, but the subject.
My complaint about the structure here aside, there’s a lot to like about this. As you noted, Mimeteh must have been the woman we glimpsed in Dodgeman’s drawings back in issue 5, and knowing that finally gives her story some weight and tragedy. A moment that has the same kind of Swingin’ Sixties kick as Gentry’s suits is the shot (see header image) of the last of the VMS, which looks like the American Vampire episode of The Mod Squad. And, of course, we get the tune-in-next-issue panel below 
which is one of those if-you-don’t-like-this-please-leave moments. Snyder has never shied away in this series from the sheer pulpy fun of his premise; he can write about all of human history and not take himself seriously–another way this is so much not Twilight.
Retelling human history with the GT underlying all of it places the idea of identity and betrayal as the core. Appropriately, we get more and deeper betrayals here, beginning with Felicia getting an elephant to spray three members of the Vassals with salt water, melting them down all Wizard of Oz-like and cutting the population of the Vassals in half. (This is exactly as awesome as it sounds.) It gets worse when we discover Bixby has flipped too, and Pearl and Felicia are down to no one but themselves to trust. Snyder makes this work, because he creates a reason for characters to flip: they know that the GT will win, so why fight? Felicia gets a moment like this too, and it’s so powerful, where she almost launches a nuclear war because killing most of the human population could actually be the least awful option. That willingness to take the premise and go all the way with it, to confront us with moral choices on a scale we’ve never seen, has always allowed Snyder to pull in so many tones to American Vampire, and it’s one of the hallmarks of great storytelling.
Skinner, as you noted, gets hit with an old-school science-fiction trope: he goes into space and comes back–a changed man! Except in his case, that means he’s no longer a vampire. What’s great about this is how it spins some earlier elements in his storyline. He’s already been buried, killed, brought back to life and put under control by the VMS, so this doesn’t play out as all that crazy. Without Skinner’s past, this would feel like a twist for the sake of twistiness, but with Skinner it feels like one more step on the journey. What will he do now–what is the Trickster when he’s one more mortal? And what will happen to the fight against the Beast with no more of Skinner’s bloodline? (Jasper’s gonna be part of the answer to that, I’m thinking.) When we began this story, Skinner was a great presence but not really a character; his story was in the past and he was there to father Pearl into vampirism. It’s one of the benefits of long-form storytelling that, like the Clash sez, the future is unwritten, and Skinner has turned into a real character, someone who grows.
Avathoir: I know one of my favorite lines is saying “this looks like X’s story, but it’s REALLY Y’s story” and that I’ve said this sort of thing verbatim at least a few times here during these conversations, but I really honestly think this arc, as much as it is about Pearl and Felicia, is about Skinner. Though he was infected (he did get cured, but more on that later) that wasn’t necessarily the end of his story, Bixby reveals SKINNER was the first choice to have the Beast inhabit his body (and continues the very interesting recurring image of male pregnancy Snyder has done in this arc, of men containing children within them. What do you think of this?) and that that Mimiteh was merely the compromise because they couldn’t find him. Now, Skinner has been left without the thing that has kept him the last one standing, and he’s going to have to make a choice about what comes next. Right now, he’s back to being human, and this might be his last, best chance at redemption, or whatever could come closest to it.
Now though as you say, Snyder has painted himself into an interesting corner: he’s gotten more and more pulpy, and while he’s been exploring these tropes, he’s also taken them into places that are very unsteady. Consider the trope of the “weapon isn’t a thing but a person” trope with the thing they’re going to use to kill the GT. It’s not a sword or (as Pearl hilariously thinks) a flashlight, but a giant severed head of an angel. How it’s going to work? I have no idea. Maybe Skinner is going to turn into the American Angel. But the question is so prompted that we have no idea where we go next. The tease has actually become something of a kudzu plot, which leaves us more questions than answers. Snyder has done this before, with Jasper and whoever is chained up in Abi’s basement, and we didn’t get answers to those. Hell, we still don’t know if Dracula is going to find a way out of the Black Sea or not! Only time can tell if he’s going to be able to wrap everything up in a couple of arcs, side stories coming out soon or no.
Wrapping up for now, (until Anthology Issue 2, which comes out in the fall) what’s left to explore for you, character wise? I feel like Snyder’s focused so much on the plot in his back half that we’ve lost a lot of the awesome character moments starting after issue seven. What’s next for our heroes, to you? Where do they have left to go?
wallflower: If the third Cycle is indeed the end of the series, then Snyder had better get going and start wrapping things up. I don’t think at this point he needs to bring everything together; it would be impossible, and more to the point, not that interesting. What he needs to do is find the spine of the story for final run. Great endings, whether it’s The Shield or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, don’t try and bring everything together, they find the one plot that takes things to an end.
When Gaiman was challenged to describe The Sandman in 25 words or less, he came up with “the Prince of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his choice.” If Skinner is truly the center of the real story of American Vampire, his essential question might be “shall one reign in hell or serve in heaven?” (I agree that although Pearl and Felicia are interesting and engaging here, they don’t change the way Skinner does. There’s less at stake (sorry) with them.) Skinner has so long been the outlaw, the Trickster; but for the first time in over a century, he’s biologically not that anymore. Look at his face in that last panel: he has genuinely changed, and not just by becoming human. The obvious play would be to have him try and get back to vampire or at least badass status, but I wonder–could Skinner feel for the first time the pull to an ordinary life? Could he become the new Henry?
I’m with you on Jasper: if the conclusion to the story is The Omen, the kid’s gotta be part of it. Vegas too; gotta love that when we go there, it doesn’t get a date like every other place, but “Now and Always.” (One more nod to The Stand there.) Given Snyder’s ability to spin out stories large and small, I hope that he actually cuts the pace back a bit and explores some other stories on the way to the necessary showdown. (I have a specific author and novel in mind for this structure but I won’t reveal it because I have an upcoming essay about it, but it has a major conflict that we know has to happen but it’s not revealed until ¾ of the way through. Snyder could pull that off too.) We’re now heading into the late sixties, with war and disorder on the way, a time when a lot of people really thought a new world was coming. Seems like a good enough setting for what has to happen.
We will be breaking the Conversation for a short period due to lack of new issues to discuss. There will be a special Anthology Discussion in the fall, and when the first arc of the third cycle concludes we will resume at that date. Until then, please be patient and look for any other discussions we might be having on a variety of topics. See you soon!