Vampire: The Masquerade #1 // Review
There are vampires in Minnesota. Of course...this is The World of Darkness, so there are vampires EVERYWHERE. Some of them are scheming against some of the rest of them. Some of them are just trying to get by as Vault Comics presents the first issue of its fully-licensed Vampire: The Masquerade comic book. Writer Tim Seeley tells the opening chapter of contemporary vampire fiction in Winter's Teeth drawn by Davmalya Pramanik. Writers Tini Howard and Blake Howard follow that-up with a far more interesting tale of impoverished fringe vampires that is brought to the page by artist Nathan Gooden.
Cecily Bain is a vampire in the Twin Cities from Clan Brujah. She doesn't want to get involved in local politics in and around the contemporary power structure. The vampire establishment maintains the Masquerade that keeps all vampires a secret from the world at large, but Cecily’s got her own issues. Elsewhere there's Colleen: a 44-year-old "thin-blood" vampire not affected by the curse nearly as much as others. She can tolerate sunlight, so she can work a job and look after a small group of outcast vampires in Duluth. Among them is Mitch: her estranged husband, who had inadvertently turned her into a vampire back in 2004.
As it is wrapped up in traditional, contemporary vampire politics, Cecily's story lacks a whole lot of novel ground. Seeley manages an engrossing moment between her and a woman who has been turned into a vampire without her knowledge. Wife and husband team Tini and Blake Howard cast a shadowy light into something fresh and interesting with Colleen's story. An impoverished 44-year-old woman capable of walking around during the day who also happens to be a vampire is restlessly alive with possibilities. The hand-to-mouth fringe poverty milieu is rarely-tread territory for the vampire genre.
Devmalya Pramanik's work in the opening story has a darkly detailed style that strongly echoes the style of artist Timothy Bradstreet, who was featured quite extensively in rulebooks and sourcebooks for the original White Wolf game back in the 1990s. The drama is carried to the page in a straightforward style that is allowed to dazzle with darkness in three visually striking final pages in the first story. Gooden's work on the second story brilliantly captures life's exhaustion in the margins of the world cursed with vampirism. Under Gooden's pen, Colleen is a casually effortless beauty with deep fatigue that reaches towards the center of her soul in a hauntingly still listlessness.
There's an appendix at the end of the issue featuring fully playable character profiles for the paper-and-dice role-playing game. Comprehensive biological details are provided for the main characters in both stories. Since the biographical information is written in the third person, it feels a bit invasive. The reader has just met these characters socially on the comics page and suddenly there's intimate details about their histories written in clinical seriffed blocks of text accompanied by numbered attributes. It IS an interesting way to interface with the backstory on the characters, though. No need for tedious exposition on the comics page if all the backstory is there in black and white at issue’s end. It makes for a more intimate walk with the vampires in question, creating a stronger link between characters and reader than one might typically expect from a new comic's first issue.
