30 Days of Night

I finally managed to drag myself away from The Sims Medieval long enough to read something.  In case it wasn't obvious enough from the title of this post, or the rather creepy picture over there to the left, that something is Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's comic, 30 Days of Night. 

30 Days of Night takes place in the extremely-northern town of Barrow, Alaska (a town which actually exists) during the month-long period of complete darkness in the winter.  A group of vampires see the great potential in weeks without the sun and go about terrorizing and murdering the town.  It's up to Sheriff Eben Olemaun to try and save himself, his wife, Stella, and the remaining survivors.

I really liked this book, more than I thought I would.  I'm not generally one for bloody, messy horror, but this story worked for me, with its straightforward storytelling and compelling artwork.  There's nothing really new about this story; the monsters are your typical (non-sparkly) vampires with fewer weaknesses than in most portrayals (it seems pretty much only sunlight or decapitation will kill them), but it's told very well.  My only real complaint about the story is that the characters aren't fleshed out very well.  About the only things we really get to know about Eben and Stella are that he's the sheriff and they're happily married.  And we learn even less about most of the other residents of Barrow.  I think this is a story that should have been longer (it's only 83 pages long).  There are also a few plot threads that are left dangling at the end of the story.  However, this is the first volume of what has ended up being a much longer series, so presumably these unresolved issues get addressed later on.

What I like best about 30 Days of Night is Ben Templesmith's artwork.  He uses color very sparingly, portraying the darkened Barrow in pretty much nothing but shades of grey, the only colors generally being red (blood), orange (fire), and some green (Eben and Stella's coats).  Templesmith's art isn't going to appeal to everyone (check out his website if you want to see more of what he's done).  His art tends more toward the abstract rather than realism, which given how violent this story is, and how I have trouble with watching realistic portrayals of violence, is something I very much appreciate.  And if you do like his art, I highly recommend checking out Singularity 7 and Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse, both of which Templesmith also wrote.

So, if you like your vampires monstrous, your gore plentiful, though not too detailed, and your stories rather short, give 30 Days of Night a look.  And I think I'll probably go about trying to check out the rest of the series.

We3

I recently finished reading Grant Morrison's book Supergods, which was part history of super hero comics and part autobiography.  I'm not reviewing it (though it was quite good and very interesting), but reading that book got me interested in taking a look at more of Morrison's work as well as some other books he mentioned.  I'm generally not one for reading super hero comics, mostly because there is just waaaay too much backstory for most of them.  I like stories to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  That said, I decided to check out one of Morrison's non-super hero stories: We3.


We3 is the story of three animals, a dog, a cat, and a rabbit, that have been cybernetically enhanced to become killing machines for the government.  After carrying out an assassination for the military, they are slated to be "decommissioned" (euthanized).  The doctor in charge of their care cannot bring herself to do this and sets them free instead.  Letting three trained killers loose goes about as well as one would expect and several people are killed.  Soldiers are sent out to hunt them down, and when that rather gruesomely fails, another cyber-creature is sent after them.

The writing for this story is really, really good.  Morrison's characterizations of the three animals (who have limited speech) are quite different from a lot of talking-animal fiction.  The three aren't furry people; they don't think as humans do.  The dog, which is the most intelligent and speaks most like a human, wants very much just to be a "gud dog", go home, wherever that might be, and is very remorseful when he instinctively kills a man who took a shot at one of his companions.  The cat's speech is less sophisticated and she shows the same general disinterest in killing a bird as killing a human, and the rabbit is the least intelligent with the simplest speech patterns.

The artwork, done by Frank Quitely, also fantastic.  You can see a preview from DC here.  The pages in the preview show pretty straightforward paneling, but throughout the book Quitely gets very innovative including layers of images highlighting minutiae during fight scenes and six pages of eighteen panels each of security camera footage detailing the animals' escape.  A word of warning for the squeamish, though: the violence depicted is definitely not for the faint of heart.  Two of the things that disturbed me the most were images of a soldier getting shot through the eye (I have a thing about eyes) and the images of the cybernetically enhanced rats, some of which had their entire heads replaced with tools such as a drill or a wrench (so very creepy!), and there are many images of bodies just ripped right apart.

We3 was recently re-released as a deluxe hardcover edition, though the one I borrowed from my library is the trade paperback that came out in 2005.  I hear that the new edition has 10 more pages than the original one, though, so I may have to snoop around my local comics shop and take a look.  If you can handle the level of violence, and don't mind getting pretty misty-eyed while you're reading, I very highly recommend checking this book out.