FIRST ISSUE: AMERICAN VAMPIRE

FIRST ISSUES: An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode” — that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

 

American Vampire

In the first comic book he has written, Stephen King takes up the vampire genre but gives it what he calls a typically American aura. American Vampire is about a Wild West outlaw who’s a sociopath even before he gets turned into a vampire. Shannon Donnelly at the DailyBeast.com is convinced, talking to King, that Twilight fans won’t go for this one. Said King: "There's been a whole spate of vampire stories where the vampires are kind of like boy toys, and they're kind of beautiful, and you want to kind of pet them and take them home with you. I think that the Twilight books, while they do have some crossover, sexually, boys and girls, for a lot of girls, this is an extremely romantic and highly-charged concept that has a sexual element but it doesn't seem as dangerous," King continued. "I go back to that thing about how vampires are terrifically sexy from the neck up and dead from the waist down, because the original vampire thing, the whole element of that was oral, you know? It was basically giving girls hickeys in the middle of the night."

King is writing American Vampire with Scott Snyder, who intrigued King with a proposal for the story that he sent the famed author of weirdness. The first issue presents two narratives: the opening episode, by Snyder, is about Pearl Jones, a young actress trying to get into movies in the 1920s; the second story goes back to 1880, where we meet Sweet, a vicious outlaw who gets bitten by a vampire in the course of his escape from custody. To some extent the second story gives the first a context (if not, exactly, an explanation): Pearl and her roomie, Hattie, have a nextdoor neighbor who looks like (and most assuredly is) Skinner Sweet, still alive (well, mobile) and still young, like any good vampire. It’s Sweet who holds the two pieces together and makes them whole. The girls are intrigued by him; and he, by them. Their exchange with him gives the first story its complete episode. Then an actor on the movie set invites Pearl to meet a movie mogul one evening, and she encounters a flight of vampires there; Snyder leaves her screaming (and us, of course, hoping to find out what happens next time). The Skinner Sweet episode, completed by his escape, ends with one of his former captors beating him to death; but when the brute turns away, we see Sweet’s eyes glowing and we know he’ll be around for a long time yet.

And it is the notion of time that attracted King to the project. "One of the things that happens when you write something like this is the themes start to suggest themselves,” he told Donnelly. “No matter what format you're working in, whether it's short stories, novels, or comics, you oughta be writing about something or you're wasting your time. And it seemed to me that this was about time, and how we get older. I loved the whole concept of the vampire — the most attractive thing about it is that you never age."

Although this is King’s first try at writing comics (the earlier King-inspired Dark Tower books from Marvel adapted the novels to the comics form, but King didn’t write anything), he’s always been a funnybook fan, he said. He grew up reading them, reports Donnelly, including the classic EC Comics — like Tales from the Crypt and Tales from the Vault — that inspired his own 1982 film “Creepshow.” Said King with a laugh: "They twisted me entirely. And I loved Superman, Captain Marvel, all those guys. I even liked Casper the Friendly Ghost! I probably should be ashamed to admit it, but I did."