The Avathoir/wallflower American Vampire Conversation 13: When The Black Turns to Red
Got the number 13 tattooed on my neck/when the ink starts to itch then the black will turn to red. (Danzig)
Avathoir: It feels appropriate to kick off this installment, the unluckiest of numbers, when we’ve just been given a monstrous dose of reality, to quote Susan Sontag. Things are gonna be pretty shitty for four years, so let’s try to deal with it by talking about this comic.
Since there’s no sign we’re getting the Third Cycle anytime soon, we’re going to do Installment 13 and just wait…it….out. We’ve just come out of the Second Cycle, which I think is up there as the single best part of the series, and now everything is moving towards the reckoning. As mentioned before by Snyder in interviews, there’s two things that are left in the main story.
- Travis is going to do…something…in Egypt (also how great was it to see Travis again? HE IS ALL GROWN UP!)
- The cumulative arc that’s heavily inspired by The Omen.
But for now we get two great framing stories by Snyder and a few other things here and there as well. wallflower, what are your thoughts as we quake with anxiety and also read about vampires from a lot of different people?
wallflower: this one has the same structure as the anthology that closed out the First Cycle: those two framing stories bracket a set of quick takes by other authors and artists that play our story with various casts and settings. There’s a sizable plot bomb in the closing story that we’ll get to, but for now, I was most impressed with stories in the middle. Unless I’m really missing something here, those stories don’t tie into the master mythology as strongly as those in the first anthology. We don’t see much of the main cast, we don’t tie into the events of world history. What we get are stories of vampires, their species, and their hunters all through the ages and a lot of ways of portraying them.
That’s the draw here. Visually, this anthology has a much broader range than we’ve seen before. Two highlights are an incredibly visually busy and colorful story (Joelle Jones’ “Teahouse”) set in Japan, and another (“The Cut”) set in revolutionary Russia. That second one brings in a new species, dying at the hands (swords actually) of the Carpathians. Steve Orlando wrote and Artyom Trakhanov illustrated it and both of them give it a crankiness that feels distinctly Russian. This species, the Ustrels, have the deficiency of poor teeth, and of course the Carpathians get all up in their business about that. We’ve seen so many kinds of vampires and attitudes about them, from tragic to comic to professional, but this one feels just pissed at the world for being the way it is. The visuals heighten that. The story looks like a lost artifact that’s been superseded by progress. Enjoyable as these few pages are, I hope we don’t see these vamps again; we’ve visited this branch of their evolution and we should let them rest in peace.
Some of the other stories in the middle do feature the main cast, but function as shading rather than plot points. What did you think of them? Does it help to spend time with the VMS or Skinner riding the rails? And what were any standout panels or stories here?
Avathoir: You’re very right that this is essentially a collection of stories that feel more like worldbuilding then filling in the blanks. There’s an Ondaatje novel (his first) called The Collected Works of Billy the Kid that has a similar approach, of anthology-as-worldbuilding. The stories we see here are more open to the outside of the main story, an excuse to do things we wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to see.
“Teahouse” is a great example of this. We never get a sense what vamps any of these characters are and we’ve never been in this location, yet we see an entire series on its own of a libertine monk and a dragon style yakuza vamp. That’s incredible. That’s a decade’s worth of stories, and that’s IT. I love that.
Kieron Gillen’s story “England’s Dreaming” is also very interesting. It’s the first time psychological warfare and deception are really introduced into the series, and it’s something I hoped we would get to see more of, but Snyder has been more of the Stephen King school when it comes to mythmaking, rather than the Mervyn Peake school of examining characters. This is not a bad thing, but it’s stuff like this that makes the Anthology worthwhile.
I think I agree with you that the least interesting stories are the ones exploring canon characters that have already showed up, and that’s because I think they’re still in worlds that they could have already been in. The story of Skinner riding the rails could have easily been a scene in Snyder’s writing, and I just don’t find that terribly interesting. Gillen did something unique, but what’s the point of doing something that’s the master could do better? There was some interesting stuff about race I wish they had done more with but that’s about it.
wallflower: Yeah, those stories don’t contribute anything we don’t already know about the characters, especially since those characters–like Skinner–have changed so dramatically since when we first met them. At this point, we don’t gain anything by going back and seeing what they were like, because what they were has been changed so much by what they’ve become. When we’re all what next? going back becomes stalling.
Like you said, the best stories here generate their own reason for being. Those reasons are so bound up with the format of comic books, in two related ways. The first is the sheer exuberance of color and line and expression in some of these. “Teahouse” and “The Cut” nail down one end of the spectrum; like anime, the former has the quality of a palette heightened to the maximum variety and intensity that we can perceive–not the maximum that’s possible, but the most we can see and still make sense of things. (Quinton Winter was the colorist here, creating shades that almost vibrate.) At the other end, there’s Szymon Kudranski’s shadow work in “When the Cold Wind Blows,” which brings in Hope Gentry, brother of Fort (see our previous Conversation for his character and role in the larger story). These images have the strong lines and simplicity of woodcuts but in color, and also the wonderful touch of Hope staking vamps with the neck of Fort’s guitar. Also, not so much in the middle as orthogonal to this spectrum, the almost photorealist work by Renato Guides in “Devil’s Own Luck.”
The variety of approaches here illustrates (sorry) the second virtue of comic books, and especially of American Vampire: what I’ve called the mythological approach to storytelling, a mode where different authors can write about the same characters. It’s perhaps the oldest mode of storytelling there is, going all the way back to the “Homeric” poets and continuing with contemporary fan-fiction. It doesn’t require a master narrative, just a common understanding of the mythic characters and settings. You’re damn right that we’d all watch a series about the monk and the vamp from “Teahouse”–I mean, if FOX can desecrate Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer by jamming him into a law-n-order procedural, then anything’s possible, even something good. The best part about these Anthologies has been the way the authors don’t just give us new scenes, but suggest entire new branches for the story to take. Call it world-implying rather than world-building.
Well, that brings us back to Scott Snyder’s framing stories–although I think there may actually be one element of continuity in the middle stories I overlooked: there looks to be a vial of acid in “The Cut” and “England’s Dreaming” that also shows up as a demon-killing weapon in the opening story. The framing device shows, in the beginning, a full-on Pearl-Felicia-Travis-Calvin-Gus-Lucia-and-holy-shit-the-Carpathians-too team-up against the Beast from Before Time (“Point is, this monster is from the start of the time of the VMS, the time of the Trader, all of it”), and then at the ending, something even tastier. You got me into this, so you can tell ‘em about it. . .
Avathoir: JIM BOOK LIVES! Yes, despite literally every indication that he has been dead since before Volume 1 even started, he has somehow lived and is NOT permanently brain damaged. He’s not happy to see Skinner, and in fact is TOTALLY PISSED OFF, and what exactly all of this means time will tell.
wallflower: One of the things Snyder has done really well in this series is to take tropes that usually annoy the crap out of me and make them work. Holy Crap He’s Alive After All is one of the laziest devices out there, usually used on television to get an actor back, but we’ve seen in American Vampire what being immortal really means, and to have Jim Book not be dead seems like a kind of curse. It also allows for a satisfying structure, the kind you can create in mythological storytelling. To have the newly mortal Skinner be the one to visit the actually immortal Book, to have their roles and even appearances reversed (Book has the elongated American Vampire look, Sweet looks not just human but vulnerable), makes it feel like a cycle has truly closed, and with the Third Cycle next, we’ll get the true final battle.
Avathoir: That Third Cycle isn’t scheduled yet, so we’re going to be doing a few other projects until it resumes. We hope you’ll join us then!