Bar Gags And Animal Cruelty: I, Vampire #14 Review

I’ve honestly missed the last several issues of I, Vampire – not because it’s a bad book or one that I don’t like, but the ugly reality is that, when you spend the week writing 1,200 word reviews of comics, it is impossible to read one while you’re writing about another, sometimes because of the pure, inexorable nature of time, other times because it’s hard to type and read when you’re already holding a glass of whiskey.

However, after finishing yesterday’s vaguely frustrating read of this week’s Angel & Faith, I figured it was as good an opportunity as any to check back in with the book. Because after reading an vampire story that seemingly blithely chucked aside the plot that had been driving the story, I thought it might be comforting to revisit vampire Andrew Bennett and his eternal war against his darker nature, and against his girlfriend Mary’s efforts to turn vampires into the ascendant race on the planet Earth.

So yeah, funny story: at some point in the last few months? It seems Andrew lost.

So here we have yet another vampire comic that, at some point, has taken its status quo and turned it on its head, reversing pretty much everything you’d expect from the book. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad… but it does mean that I’m not entirely sure what in the hell is going on.

The issue opens with Bennett and some new vampire skank named Tig with whom I am not familiar going full, evil vampire on a character named Debbie Dancer (apparently a long-time member of I, Vampire continuity) when Mary and former Bennett ally Professor John Troughton bust in, loaded for bear and itching to kill them some title protagonist. Apparently somewhere between, say, issue 6 and now, Bennett decided that the past simple tense of “tortured” was more fun than its adjective form. The trio escape via the creative use of kerosene and a flaming arrow (actually, it’s not that creative. Those two things put together pretty much only do one thing), forcing Bennett and Tig to escape and heal themselves. The trio then return to Boston (yes!) to pursue a plan to recreate the circumstances of Bennett’s birth in order to return his good side, while Bennett and Tig go to New York to recruit some magical firepower in an attempt to raise an army.

If that plot summary sounds like there’s not a hell of a lot going on in this book, well, you’d be partially right. More than half the book is devoted to the initial escape from Bennett, which is a lot of real estate for what amounts to “set vampire on fire and run like hell.” However, writer Joshua Hale Fialkov uses the sequence not only to inject some action into the issue, but to demonstrate how reprehensible Bennett has become via some targeted taunting of each of the vampire hunting trio… and by having Bennett kill Dancer’s dog. Which was a two page sequence that gave me a real cognitive dissonance; on one hand, seeing someone kill an innocent animal is a quick, easy and effective way to make a reader hate and loathe a character… but on the other, the logical part of me locked on the “quick and easy” part of that description. The sequence had its intended effect, but it had it while my left brain kept muttering, “Fialkov is using an easy trick to manipulate you.” Part of that reaction arose from the fact that I’ve never seen this dog before – he just suddenly appears in time to become lunch. I’m willing to give the sequence a certain amount of a pass since I might have missed backstory showing Dancer’s relationship with the dog from a prior issue, but as a self-contained read, the animal attack felt almost as cynical as it was affecting.

Frankly, the sequence where Bennett and Tig recruit Thompson, a magic user who supposedly has “magical skills almost off the charts,” felt really forced. Again, I might have missed meeting this character and seeing his power in a prior issue, but there is no indication in this sequence that Thompson has any power beyond the ability to do two quick shots without yorking on his own shoes. Seriously: the only “magic” the guy does comes straight from an old episode of Cheers. In addition, Thompson changes his tune vis-a-vis vampirism really fucking fast – he says no less than twice that he hates vampires, and within a page and a half, Bennett has recruited him so thoroughly he voluntarily gets turned.  Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Rob,” you’re thinking, “Vampires have the well-known power to hypnotize people when people look into a vampire’s eyes!” And sure enough, artist Andrea Sorrentino depicts Thompson looking directly at Bennett throughout the entire conversation… while also depicting Bennett wearing big, black, wraparound Bono shades. It would have been easier for Thompson to see Bennett’s balls than it would have been his eyes.

So we have a sequence where we are expected to believe that Bennett persuades a powerful magic user to join his side… but based on the evidence on the page, for all we know Bennett was taken in by a bar bullshit artist whose first words in the next issue will be, “Awesome! I tricked you into making me immortal! So long, cirrhosis of the liver… what? Magic? Um, is this your card?” The whole sequence just has holes in it that you can drive a bus through. It makes Bennett look less like a master strategist than a guy whose next move to fund his army will be to hop a plane to Nigeria to collect a percentage of royal gold. It makes it look like the only weaknesses vampires have in the DC Universe are stakes, fire, and the short grift.

Sorrentino’s art is much the same as it has been on this book in the past: it is dark, moody and strangely detailed and yet minimalistic; using extremely fine lines for detail, while using a ton of shadow to withhold visuals to keep everything mysterious. Since this issue is a smaller-scaled story, with a small number of players, the style builds mood and menace without obscuring the action the way I found it did during the big vampire battles of earlier issues. His panel layout and pacing are excellent – using bigger panels when Bennett attacks the dog slows things down and accentuates the horror – and his methods of switching vampires from Twilight-style hot people to unhinged-jawed monstrosities helps to hammer home the nature of the beasts. Throw in the generally dark and limited palette used by colorist Marcelo Maiolo, and what you wind up with is suitably eerie, good-looking art for a horror story.

I will again stipulate that I am a few issues behind on I, Vampire, and therefore may be missing story and character points and details that might flesh out some of what I’m seeing in issue 14. But I can only comment on what is in this particular issue, and what’s here simply misfires on several levels. Fialkov succeeds in demonstrating the depths to which Bennett has sunk during the dog killing sequence, but without any background on Dancer or her relationship with the animal, it came across to me as a cynical shout of, “Look! He’s such a prick he’ll kill a dog!” And while I’m sure I was meant to feel a sense of foreboding over Bennett’s turning of Thompson, I instead got the sneaking suspicion that this even mastermind had been duped by some drunken former Houdini geek.

The issue did succeed in making me have the urge to dig out the last few issues of I, Vampire to bring myself up to speed… but it did so by making me mutter, “I must be missing something, because the stuff that’s here that doesn’t seem cynical and easy instead seems shortsighted and unbelievable.” As part of a longer story, it might be great, but on its own? Yeah, this isn’t the place to jump on.