| June
2008 |
Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria, Warren Pleece, Life Sucks (FirstSecond, 2008), $19.95, paper.
For no good reason (and for plenty of bad ones) I really
wanted to not like this book. I am almost as tired of
vampires these days as I am of zombies, and I was pretty
sure I would have everyone on my side when I came up with
some clever bon mots about metaphorical monsters and the
hipster creators who love them. I actually even wrote some
of them up, and trust me they were very funny and scathing.
You would’ve loved them. But then I decided I better
actually read Life Sucks. And for all kinds of good reasons I had
to get over myself and admit that the book is an absolute
gem.
Our hero is Dave, who made the fatal mistake of applying
for a nightclerk position at a local convenience store only
to discover that the owner is an undead émigré named Lord
Arisztidescu (Radu, to his friends). Ever wonder why all
vampires are rich, unconcerned with the day-to-day
responsibilities of paying rent or keeping themselves in
coffins and all that vampire couture? Abel and Soria seem
to have worried over this a lot and decided it was time
someone told it like it is. As it turns out, vampires are
wage-slaves like the rest of us… well, of course not like
the rest of us. Because being “hired” by Radu--a decidedly
unglamorous eastern European who owes more to the stylings
of Steve Martin and Dan Akroyd’s 1970s Wild & Crazy
Guys than to the 1930s elegance of Lugosi’s Dracula--means
serving him for all eternity as his undead, minimum wage
night clerk. To make matters worse, Dave is pining for
Rosa, a goth-chick vampire wannabe who doesn’t even know
he’s alive… or, more accurately, doesn’t even know he’s
undead.
The premise is funny and smart, and for that reason it is
unfair that Life
Sucks has sparked
seemingly inevitable comparisons in the reviews to
Clerks
(which for the record, since
no one has the guts to say it, is both un-funny and un-smart). Unlike Clerks, Life Sucks is so much more than its premise. Abel
and Soria clearly developed a real affection for their
characters and lived with them a long time, to the point
where they became much more real and moving than the
premise would suggest. This is a funny book, but it is also
a moving story, presenting a complex cast of characters
who--even if they can’t cast a reflection--are remarkably
believable and multidimensional. Even the book’s villain,
the super-rich, surfer vampire who serves as rival for
Rosa’s attentions, is just desperate enough in his desire
for Dave’s respect to make us almost overlook his nasty
habit of decapitating his vampire brides as soon as they
begin to bore him. And our hero is far from perfect,
despite his heroic attempts to maintain a vampire version
of vegetarianism into his afterlife (with disastrous
consequences for his street cred). Dave can be selfish and
immature, and the Faustian bet he makes with Wes for Rosa’s
hand turns out to have repercussions he will be living with
for a long, long time.
It is worth pausing here to remark once again on the
remarkable output of FirstSecond in its first few years in
the business. 2008 is shaping up to be its strongest year
yet, with entries like Pedrosa’s Three Shadows, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s splendid
nuts-and-bolts textbook, Drawing Words and Writing
Pictures, and
some exciting projects coming out in the next few months.
Even as they remain committed to their primary target
audience of literate young-adults, they continue to expand
into broader markets with consistent quality and a love for
the form that is unmistakable in everything they do. Don’t
let my good friends in the Pacific Northwest know I said
this, but it might well be that FirstSecond is the best
graphic novel publisher out there today.
The pacing of the book is perfect, the twists just right
and just at the right time to keep you wanting to follow
this story out to the end. One can see how much Abel has
matured as a storyteller in working through her first long
narrative in La
Perdida and in
codifying some of those discoveries for her recent how-to
guide. But without knowing who is responsible for what in
the writing here, it is clear to me as a long-time fan of
Abel’s work that the final product owes much to Soria’s
work as well, and I am hoping we will see more of him in
the future. In fact, I am hoping, as Soria suggested in a
recent interview, we will also see more of Dave, Rosa, Wes
and the whole undead crew. Go out and buy this book so I
can get a sequel (a far cry, no, from the bratty reviewer
who only a few paragraphs ago was ready to trash the whole
thing without having read a word?).
