“I don’t dig vampires. I just don’t. I don’t find them terribly interesting. They’re done to (un)death. There aren’t a lot of places for the vampire narrative to go. It’s been done. Same thing applies to a lot of fiction, true, and there are a lot of sectors of fiction that I rarely get into because I feel like they recycle too much shit (epic fantasy, epic sci-fi, basically anything epic. Apparently, “epic” is shorthand for “Yeah, we’re doing this again.”).
American Vampire tries to rewrite vampire history, but it mostly retreads different aspects and puts them together with some new elements, elements heavily scaffolded by existing tropes.
I’m also just not glamoured by the thing where we show how a fictional element like vampires can be integrated into history as we know it. That doesn’t do much for me, seeing a flapper as a vampire, an old west outlaw, a native Indian outlaw, all that stuff. Like, “Holy shit, this whole portion of mythology makes so much sense now that I know Rasputin was really a vampire!” It works for a lot of people, but I guess I’m just immune to those charms.
American Vampire is aight. If you like vampires, I think you’ll enjoy this quite a bit. I think the omnibus is a great way to read it, too. There aren’t too many connections (although the whole Book/Sweet thing that connects them up a la Wolverine Origins framework is unnecessary, old-school-comics nonsense), but I think the family lines and whatnot work better when you get them straight through.”