30 Days of Night

Written by Steve Niles
Art by Ben Templesmith

I've come at this series rather backwards, having previously read David Lapham's wonderful mini-series, and the trade with the only so-so Matt Fraction story. I figured it was time to check this out from the beginning, and see what the original premise is.

It's a good idea. A group of vampires decide that a town in Alaska that doesn't receive sunlight for one month of the year would be a good place to be able to eat and rampage in the open, and so they go there. The local sheriff and his wife offer up the only resistance available. That's basically it.

What I've noticed about my few forays into this series, is that there is a lot of politics involved in being a vampire, and the older, more established ones will always tell the younger ones what to do. This leads to fighting, which seems to be the core of the drama for this series.

Templesmith's art is at it's messiest best, and while some pages are not particularly clear, they all carry his unique, yet Ted McKeever inspired, approach. This is a decent comic, although I'm not sure I'm in a huge rush to pick up the rest of the volumes. They'd have to be pretty inexpensive, as I don't feel like there's much here that's new.