Rating: WORTHY!
This graphic novel about vampires is hilarious. It deftly removes all the sickly sparkle from the modern genre (a sparkle which was never there in the early vampire stories save for the one written by John Polidori (The Vampyre), inspired on that famous night when Mary Shelley invented Frankenstein). In this story, there wasn't a glimmer of glamour. This one is more like a cross between Dracula and Clerks. The art work by the unlikely named Warren Pleece, and by Gabriel Soria was functional but nothing spectacular by any means. I wonder if this style was chosen precisely because it complemented the dressed-down" text? Who knows?!
The story is of a young man, Dave, who applied for a night shift job at a convenience store. He didn't know the store owner was a vampire, so went happily into the stock room where he was "turned" and became enslaved to his maker. I don't know who first invented that trope, but it is popular in the genre. Now the sort owner can get his employee to do anything he wants him to do for minimum wage and he can't be denied! Great business plan, huh? The sad thing is that from the employee's perspective, nothing has improved - it's all deteriorated. Dave doesn't get women fawning over him as vampires are popularly supposed to do. He still has to work for a living (so-called), and he used to be a vegetarian, so now his diet is appalling to him. He drinks plasma and substitutes, shrinking nauseously from the idea of actually biting someone. Un-life seems hardly worth living until he encounters a charming Goth girl, Rosa, a Latina.
Here's where the novel took a bit of a slide for me, because the only thing he (and his friends) have to say about the girl is that she's beautiful, so here we are once again objectifying women. Rosa is given no other credit. Admittedly the guy is lusting for her from afar and doesn't know her when the novel begins, and admittedly he's not the sharpest tack in the box, but this business of rating women solely on their looks is as primitive as it is obnoxious when you get right down to it. Graphic novels in particular need to get over this. In this case it was bad because Rosa is shown to be rather dumb and precipitous, so maybe they were right, and beauty is all she actually had going for her.
The funny thing here is that Rosa has a rather Twilight take on vampires and sees them as suave, sophisticated, wealthy dilettantes. She's unconvinced when Dave tries to educate her about how un-life actually is. Rosa starts falling for surfer vampire (now there's a concept) Wes, and Dave rails against it, pissing Rosa off, until she finds out for herself how Wes really is. Later, she learns of Dave's true nature. She wants him to turn her, but he won't, because he doesn't want to condemn her to his un-life style.
The ending is crappy, but it's worth putting up with that for the rest of the story. I recommend this as a worthy read.
