He makes her the second American Vampire. But Skinner Sweet, now drifting around California, sees potential in Pearl. In the 1920s storyline we meet aspiring actress Pearl, who is fatally wounded by a group of vampiric Hollywood producers. But it also gives him an advantage his ancestors don’t share: an immunity to sunlight. This evolutionary step grants Sweet the immortality and strength of the traditional vampire. When Sweet gets out of coffin in the morning, he finds himself the first of a new breed, the American Vampire. The charismatic but unscrupulous Sweet is bitten by an aristocratic European vampire after trying to rob the bloodsucker’s train.

Here we are introduced to outlaw Skinner Sweet, the dominant, if not always central, force of the series. The first arc of “American Vampire” takes place in 1920s Los Angeles, with a background story set in the Old West (written by Stephen King). “Throughout history, vampires have secretly walked among us, hunting humans and wielding power from the shadows.” Snyder, with artistic collaborators Rafael Albquerque, Sean Murphy and Danijel Zezelj are busy creating one of the great comics. We get an addictive, long-running series where characters grow, change and sometimes die. But his creator-owned “American Vampire,” published by DC’s Vertigo imprint, combines the best of both worlds. Snyder knows his way around standard comic-book formats-most recently he’s been writing DC’s “Swamp Thing” and “Batman” (the best since Grant Morrison and possibly more engaging).

Roughly speaking, the first type is similar to television and the second to film. Most comics are either long-running series with an ageless central protagonist (“Spiderman”) or self-contained, finite stories (“Watchmen,” “Maus”). I’ve seen the time-jump device used on television, most explicitly in the HBO series “Mad Men.” There are probably examples from the comics world, but none spring to mind.

The jumps in time give Snyder the opportunity to test his characters against historical circumstance and to explore the many possibilities of the vampire as metaphor. It only beats once a minute.”Įach story arc of “American Vampire” makes a jump forward in time, taking some characters along, leaving some in the dust and introducing us to new ones. A review of the third volume of Scott Snyder’s “American Vampire” (2012).

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