The American Vampire Conversation on the Solute
In Which Avathoir and wallflower Discuss the First Cycle of American Vampire

Installment 3: Viva Lost Vegas

Avathoir: We’re back! Welcome to The American Vampire Conversation, everybody! For those of you just tuning in for the first time, wallflower and I have finished our Conversation on American Vampire volume 1, and now we’ve finally made it onto VOLUME 2 (Applause, cheers). This is the first arc after the introductory volume, and we’ve jumped ahead around seven years in time, from Silent Hollywood to the construction of The Hoover Dam.

wallflower, since I opened the first two Conversations, would you open this one? I’m curious to know your thoughts.

wallflower:  Our volume 1 Conversations discussed the relation of American Vampire to American history, comics, and American literature.  What struck me about volume 2 was the way this story starts interacting with other vampire stories and mythologies.  Early in the story, we meet for the first time members of the Vassals of the Morning Star, bringing in something that goes back to Team Van Helsing:  the anti-vampire society.

It’s something that’s been done a lot, and probably done best by Joss Whedon.  I’m not thinking so much of the Watchers from Buffy, but the law firm of Wolfram and Hart from Angel.  It’s not exactly what we’re talking about here, but Whedon got that Pynchonian sense of an organization that goes so high up that it’s behind much of our reality, and yet it’s still subject to the same kind of petty problems and jurisdictional questions as any other organization.

The Vassals don’t quite have that feeling here, yet.  (It’s the nature of long-form storytelling that you don’t reveal everything at once, and I’ve already seen some good stuff about them in volume 3.)  So far, they have a straightforward kill-all-vamps agenda, but there’s an interesting twist in that they’re willing to make deals with vamps (like Pearl, who comes back near the middle of this story) in order to hunt other vamps.  It’s potentially a good addition to the story, one that can generate new levels of loyalty and therefore new possibilities for conflict; we already have a good moment where Pearl won’t give up Skinner Sweet’s weakness because they’re still the same kind of creature.  The Vassals could also become just another set of boring antagonists.  We’ll see where this goes.

Avathoir: It’s times like this when I realize “oh yeah, wallflower hasn’t read this series and I have”, so let me assure you that (no spoilers!) that the Vassals are much more interesting than they first appear, as you’ve already gauged. They’re interesting because even though they have this over-arching power, they are an incredibly personal organization, as Straw hints at with Felicia regarding how she loses control regarding Skinner. It’s an entire organization made up of people who want revenge for whatever reason. This is their strength (as we see when Hobbes and Abilena pay a visit to Pearl and Henry) and their weakness (which we’re going to see in Volume 3 and beyond, when we encounter Snyder’s real intentions with the various members, as well as the events that force them into an active role).  Even though they’re vampire-killers, however, they are much more pragmatic and even forgiving than you’d might think, so I’m interested to see what you think of them.

There’s three stories that are present in Volume 2: Cashel, Pearl and Henry, and Hattie. Let’s start with Cashel. In a lot of ways, I see him as something of Jim Book’s reincarnation. He’s just, ruthless, and he wants more than anything to do the right thing. Like Jim, he loses his true love because of Skinner, but he has his son with him, whereas Jim died before he ever met Felicia. Cashel’s story is something to a story of adaptation to me, where as America grows it learns to deal with new threats: where Jim had no chance, Cashel can go onward.

wallflower:  That’s right.  Jim was a figure out of the literature of the frontier American West, the lawman faced with doing justice, no matter what the cost; Cashel’s a little closer to the modern policeman.  He’s part of an organization, however flimsy (it’s a nice touch that this is a story set in Las Vegas in the era of the Hoover Dam, not Bugsy Siegel; prostitution plays a role here, but not gambling).  Cashel has a code somewhere between Jim Book and a modern cop, but he makes it his own.  He’s an orphan, adopted by a vampire passing for human, so he’s another example of someone from the modern American West who has no past, and creates an identity for himself; Snyder is extremely good at selecting thematic resonances.

In terms of plot, the essential difference between Cashel and Jim is that it’s Cashel’s child who gets vamped, not himself.  He’s this bearer of something he finds evil but can’t stop loving, which comes up a lot in horror.  We get the sense in volume 2 of people set adrift by vampirism, and people, like Pearl, who try and make a home to escape it.  20th-Century America was caught between those two impulses:  the expanded freedom in its culture and its geography and its establishment as a world power, and that’s reflected in the contrast between Cashel driven from his home and Pearl, who has settled into her life with Henry.  It makes sense that the defining historical event of this volume is the construction of the Hoover Dam, both a generator of a huge amount of energy, activity, and crime, and also a monument that will endure as part of civilization.

We’ve been discussing a lot the symbolic structure of this work, and Snyder’s such an expert at it, choosing his symbols and moments with great care and effect.  Does this work for you as a story, though?  Do the characters have a life, and do you care, outside of their meaning?
Avathoir: I absolutely care! Cashel’s struggle with what happens to his son is a story of paternal love first and foremost. His entire narration, in fact, is his monologue to that son about what’s happened to both of them, how they ended up without their home and the third member of their family. If I didn’t care about that, then I would not be reading this comic at all, but I do care. I care partially because Snyder is great at writing these kinds of characters, and also because it’s a beautifully sad story, one that resonates because of those primal feelings it stirs up (how would a parent read this, I wonder?)

Your topic also makes me want to go on to Pearl and Henry’s story. We only get two issue with them this time, but it feels like a lot more because of how effective Snyder and Albuquerque are at their storytelling. Pearl and Henry have been together now for about seven years, living their life together hiding in small towns. It’s really remarkable how even though we’ve missed a lot of their lives together (Henry always loved Pearl, but she didn’t necessarily love him at the end of Volume 1), we feel this immense love between them. The sequence in particular where we see things from Pearl’s view and Henry seems to age panel by panel is among the most gorgeous and sad half pages I’ve ever seen. In fact, I’m a little disappointed there’s the whole “former friend of Henry working for vampires thing” going on in these two issues, as it’s really a vastly better character relationship than anything else. It really goes to emphasize how these two live together, from Pearl’s anxieties to Henry’s almost inhuman empathy towards Vampires and the Vassals alike. I want to know more of what you thought of that section, and also about the reappearance of Hattie. Did they work for you? What did you get out of them?

wallflower:  Oh, Pearl and Henry are great.  They’re very much in the contemporary tradition of Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams, trying to have an ordinary life while being extraordinary people.  What makes them work so well (it’s something that Snyder and Whedon do better than Abrams) is it’s their everyday qualities that matter most.  Pearl and Henry are fundamentally two people in love, and Snyder suggests that so well in his panels.  Their dialogue and their homes have a lived-in, naturalistic feel to them, and we have an excellent full page of Henry just playing music and enjoying it.  “. . .and then we go back to being us, Pearl and Henry, just like anyone else.”  That kind of naturalism in the supernatural world (what Abrams called “ordinary people in extraordinary situations”) has made for a lot of powerful storytelling in our time (Whedon’s Avengers is the best example) and Snyder fits in to that tradition.  The only problem with that tradition is that you wind up wanting just to have downtime with the characters; really we need a volume that’s just Henry and Pearl engaging in some interior decorating, so forth.

It’s also something that resonates with the larger American storyline.  Pearl and Henry live in the small towns scattered throughout Southern California; I like the touch of them living at Lake Arrowhead, which is kind of around Neptune if you consider Los Angeles the sun.  Pearl’s first line there is “time moves differently up here than it does in the city.”  This isn’t the frontier any more–there’s a jazz club within reach–but it’s not the city.  (Mateus Santolouco has a beautiful image of that club as a house on the edge of a forest.)   There’s also the detail that Hattie’s being held prisoner and tortured in a gas station, that most necessary element of modern westward expansion, and again, Skinner plants himself right at the booming transformation of the Hoover Dam.  America is changing and growing, and Snyder neatly locates our characters at different but critical points in that change.

We’ve been talking about goodies like character and setting and symbols; how does this work as a story?  We’re two volumes in to a supposedly six-volume arc; do we have a necessary feeling of motion, and characters moving towards a greater conflict?  One thing the Vassals bring to this story is that sense of a larger conflict.  There’s clearly been bigger showdowns in the past and there’s a sense that one will be coming in the future.  That Henry gives up Skinner’s weakness (it’s gold, and how appropriate is that?  We damn well better see some Bretton Woods Conference plotlines, is all I’m saying) sets up the possibility of a Henry/Pearl conflict.  The weakness of a long-running series is that it can devolve into repetitive, uninventive, episodic storytelling (looking at you, Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead).  How about this; is it satisfying storytelling so far?

Avathoir: Let me just say that I would read the SHIT out of a “Henry and Pearl hang out and decorate their latest house” volume. That would be incredible (then again, both of us find strange things fun). I’ll say it again: This comic is a love story, and this volume is full proof of that. Henry tells Abilena about the Gold factor because he loves Pearl, and Abilena promises the Vassals will always protect Pearl because she recognizes that, because she knows that Henry and Pearl do love each other. She sees herself and Jim in Henry and Pearl, though the dynamic is shifted in some excellent ways (sex, aging, and the curious aspect that Pearl and Henry can’t, or choose not to, have children. There is no Felicia for them. Then again, there was a seven year gap from when we last saw Pearl and Henry, so if that came up, Snyder’s keeping mum until later, and recent issues have apparently hinted my theory that they have a kid running around might not be too farfetched).

It’s hard for me to talk about this as a story at this point in the game without spoiling anything from you, but I have to say that I don’t have any complaints. This still feels very much like a beginning, like Snyder is laying groundwork, and a lot of the real plot is going to come to a very, very dramatic gearshift in the two stories of Volume 3. The Vassals are going to have a lot more development, and there will be things and moments that mean that nothing will be the same. Hattie’s going to take a while to make herself known (she’ll probably want to wait to make herself known for maximum surprise anyway. This IS Hattie we’re talking about). There’s a lot of stuff Snyder has kept a secret, and for good reason. For now, I want to enjoy this feeling with Pearl and Henry before it all comes to a head. Too often we neglect the beginnings, we rush off to get the main plot started, and I want to enjoy my time among these characters before Snyder starts up his symphony.

This will all come into play as we discuss Volume 3, which will be split into two installment to cover the two stories. The first one will cover Henry in Japan, and the second will cover Felicia in Europe. Tune in next time for Installment 4: Pacific Overtures, and Installment 5: The Fearless Vampire Killers!