American Vampire: Pearl's Story - Part 1 + 2 of 5

[espanolbot]

The first volume of American Vampire is divided between the stories of Skinner Sweet, an outlaw in the Old West who becomes the "first" American Vampire (a Native American woman is revealed laters in the series to have been around first), and Pearl, an aspiring actress in the 1920s who becomes the "second".

I may come back to Skinner's story later, but for now I'll focus on Pearl, as I find her the more interesting of the two...

The story begins thirty miles outside of Los Angeles in 1925, where a hooded figure with a lantern is driving a sinister cargo out into the desert to bury. Said cargo being the bodies of some half dozen women, drained of blood and covered in bitemarks.

The figure begins to bury them, not hearing one of them, a young woman named Pearl, desperately try to say she's still alive as the dirt is piled on top of her...

We cut to three days previously, where Pearl and her friend Hattie, are discussing the first films that they'd seen. The pair are aspiring actresses, hoping to make it big, but at the moment only just scraping by on rent at the moment.


Later, Pearl is just finishing her shift at one of her aforementioned three jobs when she bumps into someone who'll make a big impression on the rest of her life.



At their work as extras later on, a big shot movie star invites Pearl and Hattie to come to a party of one of the major producers in town, implying that if they make a good impression then they might get some big roles for themselves along the line. Being kind of naive, Peal doesn't see anything sinister with this, and later than night heads off to the party, despite the weird cowboy man by their pool warning them against it.





Next issue, Hattie and the guy with the guitar who kept asking Pearl out (his name's Henry) come across Pearl in the desert, she having dug herself out of the grave she and the other victim of the vampires were unceremoniously dumped. She's rushed to hospital, but the amount of blood she's lost has caused irreversible damage to her heart, lungs, brain and kidneys, effectively leaving her braindead, to her friends' dismay.

Later that evening, the man with the cowboy hat breaks into her hospital room, and since it's the fourth of July and all, he jokes that it would be "downright unpatriotic" of him to let Pearl miss America's 149th birthday...

Pearl then wakes up, apparently none the worse for wear... considering she wakes up in the morgue. She steals a coat, and heads home, finding the cowboy man, Skinner Sweet, waiting for her...
<







Pearl's venom slowly paralyses Hamiliton, who she then interrogates about the vampires that killed her. Then she eats him and dumps his corpse in his dressing room.

Comments

[zapbiffpow]

Ah, Pearl Jones. Lotta blood for you to wade through before you're done.

You don't mind if I consider posting from Long Road to Hell, don't you, espanolbot? I'd like to close the circle before someone posts from Second Cycle.

[espanolbot]

The second Travis Kidd story? Haven't gotten than far unfortunately, though I should get it when the next trade comes out next week. :)

[icon_uk]

That's quite the transformation Pearl has!

I like the relflection being distorted, not absent.

[mrstatham]

That is, to me, one of the smartest things Snyder has done with American Vampire; He hasn't thrown everything out the window to suit him. There's an explanation later in the series that basically states that his main take on the vampire is merely a different 'American' breed that has developed as an offshoot of the European line - and the European line is, for all intents and purposes - the 'classic' vampire, but he also introduces a number of other variants that are drastically different from each other, but are similar enough that they're basically lumped together under the same umbrella by people in universe. It's really smart, having read to Volume 5.

And Pearl is certainly the ideal kind of lead for a story like this, so I like that you're focusing more on her and less on Skinner, who is easily a more Joker-esque 'look at me doing this awesome terrible thing' character.

EDIT: Also, given the car-based analogy Skinner makes, I'm curious as to whether Snyder will continue that as an in-joke and basically have the American breed of vampire be absolutely screwed by about the 90's. Their lack of real numbers alone don't make it particularly promising.

[zapbiffpow]

Yeah, Pearl rules harder than Skinner Sweet ever could, and Sweet rules pretty hard already. Given time and plot, I bet she'd make a better alpha vampire than him.

The one thing I'm concerned about is moving the series forward too fast. I wish they'd stayed close to the pre-post WW2 years. Else it might just end up just another 'vampire in modern times' story.

[mrstatham]

Well, they've literally entered the second half of the series, now, with Second Cycle, so it's pretty much a given, I think, that the series will end in modern times. That doesn't, of course, stop them from doing more minis and the like set during different periods; They already did a good job with two of those.

I do agree it's maybe moving too fast, but at the same time, I feel Snyder's doing a great job of keeping the characterisation consistent, but adding a few more wrinkles as each decade passes; Pearl and Henry's relationship is utterly heartbreaking, in that respect.

[espanolbot]

Although it is moving forward at a rather brisk pace, I feel that Snyder is doing a good job at filling in the blanks with flashback stories, such as the story about the actual FIRST American vampire that Skinner semi-encountered in his pre-outlaw days.

[zapbiffpow]

Oh, god, Henry and Pearl...

You know, Henry Preston's last letter is one of my favorite things Snyder ever wrote, next to Dick Grayson's everything in Black Mirror.

[skemono]

Man, only three years after Nosferatu came out, and it's already become common wisdom that vampires are killed by sunlight?

[cainofdreaming]

If anyone would know of the Hollywood vampire it'd be someone who works in the industry, right?

[espanolbot]

Which is amusing as a) Nosferatu was actually a German production that attempted to adapt Dracula in such a way that they wouldn't have to pay any royalties to Bram Stoker's wife, and b) in this continuity Dracula both exists and actually can be harmed by sunlight, even though he can't in the actual book (inspired by Stoker encountering a member of the vampire-slaying organisation that encountered him).

Which makes you wonder if the makers of the movie inserted that detail into the movie on purpose in this continuity, and the near successful attempt to destroy all copies of the movie was less due to the royalties issue but more due to the Carpathian breed (the most populous vampire breed, who are also the antagonists in this story) being pissed at their main weaknes being made public..