The Conversation on the Solute
Avathoir and wallflower discuss the first Cycle of American Vampire
Installment 4: Pacific Overtures

 

Warning: Like all Conversations, This contains SPOILERS. Read at your own risk.

 

 

wallflower:  The centerpiece of the three-story volume 4 of American Vampire is “Ghost War,” largely set on the island of Taipei in World War 2, and setting Henry, Skinner, and later Pearl against some seriously ugly motherfuckers.  (Snyder and Albuquerque make these vampires eyeless, which is a great touch.  It’s primally disturbing and it makes them look like GIs whose helmet have fused to their heads.)  “Ghost War” continues one of the distinct pleasures of long-running stories like this, The X-Files, Buffy, and Angel:  the opportunity to sample different genres.  This one’s a widescreen war adventure; the panels are more active than they’ve ever been.  Albuquerque does something very cinematic here, alternating wider shots of the actions with closeups to produce a strong storytelling rhythm; of all the stories, this is the one I wanted to read fast.  He also uses Dutch angles, low shots for old-school heroic perspective, and some amazingly active shots:  the opening page of part five, with the narration in blocks on the left, a sketch of a corridor on the right, and gunfighting, neck-slashing action in the center, and everything oriented to a vanishing point, does everything you can ask comics to do.  There’s also a strong breadth to the supporting cast, as Snyder brings in other soldiers with their own backstories, and just like in a classic war movie, they reveal them to us in moments of crisis.  Think of a Sam Fuller movie that got invaded by H. P. Lovecraft and you have a sense of what this is like.

 

Before we get back to the question of genre, what were some other visuals here that you liked?

Avathoir: I must admit I’m not a devotee to visuals much. I like words (as noted by my entries) but I must say that Alberquerque really outdoes himself here (as does Sean Murphy, whose work we’ll talk about in the next installment). He’s mastered vampire anatomy here for instance. Where before they looked merely like humans with super-long finger claws and rattlesnake heads (at most) here they come off as being creatures of joints while at the same time being almost rubbery. Sometimes, watching Skinner or Pearl move in this story, it felt like watching a glitch in a video game. The movements were clearly wrong to what a human body is capable of, and that’s just the point. It reminds me of the famous scene in the original Japanese version of Pulse, where the ghost seems to almost trip, and its in now way “scary” but it become UTTERLY TERRIFYING. That’s how horror works, though: Taking the mundane and making it incomprehensible. And when the body becomes like that, what else isn’t safe?

The colors here are also a huge step up. In volumes one and two, we were smothered in west-coast sunshine, as befitting the setting, but now the colors become more muted. There’s more earth tones, and the lines aren’t necessarily the borders anymore (which kind of fits the story, now that I think about it). Of course, this is appropriate, given the setting and the murkiness of the whole situation, but when even Skinner’s almost golden-white hair becomes filthy, you know you’re in the shit.

Besides color, of course, is light, and that’s where the visuals here really shine. This is the first one of the stories in American Vampire where legitimately nobody has any idea of what’s exactly going on (and most interestingly, they don’t know any more after they start). Everybody’s “in the dark” so to speak, and the shadows reflect that. We see people in silhouette surprisingly a lot, and is there a scarier scene when the survivors of the mission look in the water to see vampires swimming underneath them, waiting to strike? It’s not just scary by the content, but from the lack of it. Just how many of them are hiding in the dark?

 

And speaking of dark, I loved your comparison of Samuel Fuller meets H.P. Lovecraft. While the other WWII story in Volume 3 is very clearly of the Howard Hawks school, this is very much Fuller territory all the way. Everyone’s way off kilter even without the vampires, almost grotesque in how they behave (“Fuck you too, Hobbes” could go down as one of the best exits to a conversation in comics). It would almost come across as comical if it weren’t so obvious how hardwired everyone is. Nobody’s naive: all the characters in the battalion are very clearly disturbed to some degree. Not even Henry–sweet, wonderful, charming Henry, who turns out to be in many ways the most damaged character of the entire battalion, and possibly of the series so far (He was in WWI, after all, and mentions barely being old enough to shave when there, so he was practically a child soldier in all but name) is proof that like Fuller, nothing’s really simple, even if we initially think it is.

 

wallflower:  That’s a good point about the colors; because this story has the greatest variety of settings so far, it makes sense that it has the greatest variety of shadings.  Albuquerque does as much as Ernest Dickerson did with lighting in Do the Right Thing to convey different times and places.  He also does so much with suggesting backgrounds, as a good comic-book should do, rather than making them too explicit and detailed.  Add that to his versatility in framing and paneling (another outstanding aspect here) and you have one of the most entertaining war movies I’ve seen in a while.

 

Like you said, the characters ground the action in some real stakes.  (Sorry.)  The melancholy that was developed in Henry has grown stronger here; Pearl says she’s been losing him “little by little in front of my eyes.”  In volume 2, Henry and Pearl moved themselves out of the orbit of Los Angeles, out of the larger activity of society.  Now they’ve decided to get involved with the homefront in WW2, and they’ve been drawn back into society, and Henry has discovered how old he’s become in the world’s eyes.  It’s a great, implicit smack in the face of the Twilight fantasy, that imagines you can just be in love with someone and live in your “perfect piece of forever.”  Henry lives in the world, and it’s active and passing him by.

 

So he’s craving the action, and when Hobbes chooses him for an anti-vampire mission, he accepts and doesn’t tell Pearl.  One of the fundamental elements of the war genre is “redemption through violence,” the idea that the fight against evil is what makes you good, that “war is a force that gives us meaning,” to steal Chris Hedges’ great title.  The war genre has always used this idea that war is what makes men, and the best works in the genre have explored, challenged, and deepened this idea.  By giving this theme to Henry, it makes it more complex and interesting, because here’s a mortal who’s in love with an immortal, going out to attack her kind and increase the danger to himself.  If what makes Pearl unique is that she can’t die, what makes Henry unique to Pearl is that he can die, and I wonder if by risking his life, Henry’s asserting what’s special about himself.  (Pearl certainly feels it, and gives Henry a vial of her blood to take if he’s going to die, and that sets up a great twist at the end.)  That’s more of a psychological reading than I usually give, but the somber tones of the colors and the melancholy of Henry suggest it.

 

It does feel very much like Fuller, who understood this aspect of war and presented it, but could never be said to celebrate it.  That feeling extends out from Henry to the entire team; they all have that damage, and that feeling of fatedness to them, and that comes out in their backstories.  One platoon member says that they’re all “ghosts”–their identities got erased before they join the mission, so this isn’t a group of soldiers who will go back to lives as citizens.  It’s another elegant way that Snyder plays with the tropes of WW2.  There’s a sadness to the people who take that kind of risk; Michael Herr in caught it in his book of Vietnam journalism, Dispatches:  the sense of those who have nothing better to do with their lives than throw it away like this.  When they run into Skinner, it feels right and would have felt right even if he hadn’t foreshadowed it with a letter to Pearl.

 

 

Avathoir: The idea of “Violence as redemption” is a very interesting one, especially because, I think you also point out, Snyder really doesn’t like that notion very much. I know Truffaut says that “There’s no such thing as an anti-war story” because it makes people excited no matter what, but if it IS possible, Snyder comes very close, just by how well he uses Henry’s character here. Henry sees “War” or combat in general as the thing that’s going to make sure he matters, and even though he gets over that idea, I don’t think he really recovers from it. This arc is one of only about two times Henry’s thoughts are really put at the forefront of the series (the other time comes later, and I refuse to spoil it), and we see that even though he’s unquestionably the most “Pure” speaking character in the entire series, he’s also likely the one who could fall the furthest. His monologue about “courting death” as he lets Skinner drink from him is not only a metaphor for his relationship with Skinner in this arc, but it’s how he’s been living. Perhaps he’s been living like that his entire life.

Keep in mind something very interesting: Henry was the one who refused to be turned by Pearl into a vampire. In volume 2 it initially seems that Pearl’s the one reluctant about turning Henry, but volume 3 makes it very clear that Henry is the one who wants to remain mortal. He’s frustrated, but he’s adamant. If the vial hadn’t broken I’m positive he wouldn’t have drank it.

This actually reminds me of the only other really “Successful” reinterpretation of the vampire myth of this century for me, Kouta Hirano’s Hellsing, which reinvents Dracula as a Lovecraftian beast. There’s a great scene, late in the series, where Dracula is telling his apprentice that humans are the only thing he wants to kill him, and the only things he believe can kill him. He explains (in so many words) that if a monster kills another monster, all it does is make a stronger monster, while a human is the only thing that kill a monster and bring peace. That’s why even though Vampires, Werewolves, and Frankenstein’s monster in Hellsing are all reinvented as Eldritch Abominations, humans remain the most powerful and noble creatures.

The same applies to the characters of American Vampire. The members of Henry’s battalion who don’t make it all die in ways that emphasize their humanity, whether sudden, dignified, or

in the case of their sergeant, sacrificing. Skinner, outside of his badass “Semper Fi, Motherfuckers!” Moment, doesn’t really do much related to completing the mission, and when he finally goes down, it’s because Pearl refutes his in all ways “monstrous” ideology.
Back to genre. Once again, Snyder is doing interesting stuff with the horror vampire genre, and he’s turned in the vampiric equivalent of the 28 Days Later zombies with the “Spirits” that reside on Taipan. These are the FIRST vampires we see that A. Transform you instantly, and B. Do not let you retain your mind after the change. In a way, they’re not very vampiric at all (case in point: they change infectees into the species of vampire they are, overriding what would happen if they were bit by the Eurovamps) clearly, we’re getting into the mythology not only of the series, but the vampire in general (As we’re going to explore when we get into Europe).

But American Vampire has always been a very personal story, and there’s something we’re gonna need to talk about. I’ve always been a big subscriber to the idea of the story where you think it’s one thing, and then something happens and you never realize it was that thing at all. I’m talking, of course, about The Kiss. I’ve got some things to say but wallflower, your thoughts on it?

 

 

wallflower:  oh man, the Kiss, Pearl kissing Skinner on Taipei. . .and then immediately following it by killing him with a gold stake to the heart.  It’s the kind of moment that makes one go back and read their whole story to see how it leads to this.  It’s the kind of layered action that will most likely look different every time I read it; the end of some Kubrick films are like that, where the action is simple but could mean so many different things.  (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket come to mind.)

 

How to read this moment largely depends on which action is the real one.  Is the kiss real–does Pearl really love Skinner, and therefore kills him as a way of denying it?  A few pages later, when Henry asks (he’s smiling, but there’s genuine worry there too) “you didn’t fall for somebody else while I was gone?” Pearl turns away and gets a darkened panel, and then another one where she says “no. . .no other musicians,” still turned away, suggesting that she lost something and she knows it.  Or is the killing real?  Was the kiss Pearl setting him up to get her gold blade, playing Skinner as he played so many others?  The killing, by the way, gets a whole page while the kiss gets half a page; that makes sense as it’s the climactic moment of the scene, but it also makes the killing stay more in one’s mind.  (Skinner’s expression is great–there’s something funny about it, a visual “what the. . .?”)

 

It’s always going to be a tricky question, and it’s goes to how Snyder plays with the question of identity, the way he always leaves in doubt who Pearl really is.  It’s the word “really” that’s most tricky here.  Pearl has been transformed; her very blood and essence has changed.  She really is a vampire.  At the same time, she’s been together with Henry for some twenty years; she really does love him.  The moment of kissing, then killing Skinner comes from the realest aspects of her, and they’ll always be in conflict.  Part of the reason Pearl is such a compelling character is that she has so much agency; these stories have largely been driven by her decisions, and so many of those decisions have been about the conflict between her two real selves.

 

If there’s a way to resolve this conflict, and I don’t know if there should be, it’s about her kinship with Skinner.  In volume two, she wouldn’t reveal the American vamps’ weakness to the Vassals of the Morning Star so that they could kill Skinner.  She said “for better or worse, he gave me this life.”  (Note the language of marriage there.)  The bond between Pearl and Skinner goes deeper than right and wrong, and probably deeper than love and hate.  Looking back at that moment from the vantage point of volume 3, you can read her refusal to give Skinner to the Vassals not as trying to protect him, but asserting her role in this story.  What she was really saying to the Vassals was “when he dies, he won’t die at the hands of people who’ve sworn to wipe us out.  He will die by my hand.”

 

 

Avathoir: The gold dagger to the heart is a wham of a moment indeed, and I won’t spoil for you what’s going to be the result of that action in further volumes (Ah, the pleasure in knowing what lies ahead). But you’re right to say that there’s a very deep bond between Pearl and Skinner that’s all kinds of messed up. It’s simultaneously hatred, marital, parental, and friendship. To add another twist, the story that precedes Ghost War has Skinner running into an old flame, who happens to look a LOT like an older Pearl gone to rot.

But back to The Kiss. I’ve told you before I think that American Vampire is a love story, and while the great love of Pearl’s life will always be Henry, Skinner is a very strong candidate for being her proverbial Replacement Goldfish when time will inevitably take its toll on him (There’s two other candidates. One whom you’ve met already, and then one who shows up as the protagonist in volume 4, but once again, no spoilers). Like you said, it’s tricky to decode exactly what that kiss means. If you ask me, I think that Pearl doesn’t exactly love Skinner. She mentions very strongly that the reason she loves Henry is because “He’s everything you’re not” and she’s not exactly the type of girl who wants to be bad. She is bad, and Henry’s not. He’s her balance, and she needs him, because Skinner, in some ways, is right: He offers her something Henry can’t give her, an indulgence of darkness. That kiss, for Pearl, is her embrace of the vampiric more than any killing she’s responsible for.

Which leads me back to Skinner. I think it’s genuine for him. Does Skinner feel love? That’s a good question, but I think Pearl is the closest thing he’s felt to it in a while. In a way, it’s like a less creepy/stupid Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling dynamic. He likes her, and will not harm her just because he finds her so compelling. He wants to bring out what feels interesting about her, and protects her when she needs it. When Skinner kisses her, it’s the closest I think we’ll ever come to hear him saying “I love you”. Well, no, that’s not true. When she stabs him he says: “That’s my girl.” which is the most romantic thing that’s ever come out of his mouth.

So now, wallflower, we’ve arrived pretty much at the halfway point of this “Cycle”. There’s one more volume before we move into the endgame of volume 5, and volume 6 is the tying of loose ends and the reveal for the second half of the series. I’d like to ask: How do you think this will affect the story from this point on, and where do YOU think the story will go following “Ghost War”?
wallflower:  the Lecter/Starling comparison is well taken; you can imagine Skinner saying or thinking “the world is more interesting with you in it.”  “That’s my girl” also comes directly from the last meeting in film between Lecter and Starling; it was one of the genuinely effective moments in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal.  I think also, with Skinner, he’s been an outlaw for his entire lives, both human and vampire.  In fact, in the brief story that opens volume 3 (“Strange Frontier”), Skinner meets the woman who sold him out and got him arrested back in volume 1, so we can see that he’s really always been alone and never able to trust anyone.  (Danijel Zezelj takes over drawing duties on this story, and he gives the panels a softer edge, both in lines and colors, than Albuquerque or Sean Murphy, who drew our next installment’s story.  It makes sense for a story that’s about memories and dreams, and how those get turned into myths.)  Skinner feels some kind of pull towards the life Pearl had, and I think he realizes he could never have it.  There’s a grace and acceptance in his death that’s new, and necessary.

 

As for where this is going?  Pearl has always been balanced between vampire and human, and between two men:  Skinner and Henry.  What’s compelling about this story is Snyder’s sense that she will always be caught between two worlds, two identities, even two bodies; that she can never be a full, authentic person because she has two real selves that can never be reconciled.  With Skinner dead, I think that’s going to unbalance, that she may have a biological need to turn towards her vampire nature.  (And there’s also the little detail that a member of Henry’s team got infected with her blood when the vial she gave Henry got blasted into him.)  Henry isn’t going to do for her vampire side; I agree that there was no way he would have ever drank from that vial.  This plot has echoes of Joss Whedon’s story of Buffy and Riley, but done right, because Snyder has done a much better job of making Henry a real character, so there really is something that could be lost here.  Wherever we’re going, I don’t think it’s toward a happy ending.

The American Vampire Conversation will continue in the second part of our Volume 3 Discussion “The Fearless Vampire Killers”, after which we’ll talk about the third story in Volume 3, as well as the first story arc of Volume 4 in Installment 6 “The Unforgiven”. Tune in next time!