30 Days of Night

Let’s take a look at the graphic novel 30 Days of Night, written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Ben Templesmith. By now you’ve probably come to expect my insanity, so I’ll get it out of the way early. Instead of attempting a Moarte imitation and filling this review with maniacal laughter, I’ll just tell you that I first heard of 30 Days of Night last October, when it appeared on Longbox of the Damned. It’s been almost a year since then, so all I remembered was the general premise of vampires attacking an Alaskan town during polar night and that an important vampire guy showed up to tell the others what idiots they were. I’m glad I didn’t remember more, because I re-watched the review just a moment ago, and it covers the entire plot. But I knew Moarte/Linkara/Lewis Lovhaug liked the comic, so I had high hopes. And anyone who knows how much time I’ve spent trying to figure out how sun-fearing vampires would fare in space shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the story’s premise grabbed my attention right away. Vampires and polar night? All right!

Once again, there will be spoilers in this post.

I’m not a big reader of graphic novels. 30 Days of Night is only the fourth graphic novel to find a place on my bookshelf. Therefore, my inexperience could be to blame here, but the art style made it kind of hard for me to follow this one. There were entire panels that forced me to use context clues from the dialogue and surrounding panels to figure out just what had happened. (For example, the ending. I read it four or five times before I realized that there was a scene break between the pages. Until then, it seemed to me like the sun rose two minutes after they said it would rise in a couple of days.)

I will praise the art for the teeth. It did a good job with teeth. They did a better job of communicating the danger of the vampires for me than the stylized sprays of blood did. But still, there were several times when the vampires’ teeth and crazy tongues (what was up with that?) reminded me of Taxxons instead of vampires. That was pretty weird, but all right. I’m not overly picky about vampires. This graphic novel’s super-strong, nearly-indestructible, deadly, evil variant was fine, although they left me with some confusion. They were a step up from the zombie-like vampires of I Am Legend, with individual personalities and the ability to plan and reason. Marlow’s plan is well thought out, even if he didn’t consider the long-term consequences. Vicente, who is aware of the consequences, comes up with a new plan to fix things. So they’re pretty smart and could possibly pass as humans, although I assume their unique font means their voices are strange. But for all that, they seem pretty one-dimensional. They’re vampires, humans are food, done. We don’t get much insight into them beyond that. I was fine with that, especially when one of the survivors turns into a vampire from a scratch (these vampires need to take care to make sure they don’t turn their victims, because this sort of vampirism spreads very easily) and immediately goes into attack mode. As soon as he becomes a vampire, he’s an enemy. That explained a lot to me–even if the vampires could think and had personalities, the people they once were ceased to exist the moment they turned. Then Eben launched his final plan to stop the vampires, and my theory died.

Eben uses vampire blood to infect himself, in the hopes that it will make him strong enough to drive the vampires away. He gets the crazy vampire font for his dialogue and becomes hungry for blood, but he runs from his wife so he won’t hurt her and goes to fight Vicente. He’s a vampire, but he’s still Eben. So what was with the other guy’s instantaneous switch to evil? Does Eben just have awesome willpower? Was it the way he was infected? Did a panel explain it and I missed it? I thought when he and Vicente were arguing about whether being a vampire is great or horrible, they were going to clear this up for me, but they didn’t.

Also, am I crazy, or did most of the vampires look like what would happen if Nosferatu was about mobsters?

+

On second thought, maybe I am crazy.

Despite my confusion, I did think the vampires were good monsters. They were dangerous, they spent most of the book killing people, and like I said, I liked the teeth. And even if they were a bit one-dimensional, there were enough differences between them to make them actual characters. When Vicente arrives, and the other vampires are clapping while he’s wondering how they could all be such idiots, I laughed. They were interesting. I just would have liked to know more about them.

And that isn’t confined to just the vampires. I didn’t feel like I knew any of the human characters, either. I rooted for them because they were the humans, but that’s it. Most of the survivors just seemed like they were there to be victims, and even the main characters, Eben and Stella, weren’t much to me beyond named good guys with a chance at success. I’d chalk it up to my unfamiliarity with graphic novels, but other graphic novel characters have come to life as characters for me.

I liked 30 Days of Night. It’s earned its spot in my tiny graphic novel collection. I just didn’t like it as much as I wanted to.