American Vampire #22

Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Rafael Albuquerque

It's great to see Rafael Albuquerque back on American Vampire.  I enjoyed Jordi Bernet's recent work on the title, but Albuquerque is the artist who caused this book to catch my eye in the first place, and things feel right when he's working on it.

With this new arc, 'Death Race', we move into the 1950s, and we meet Travis Kidd, a young and unaffiliated vampire hunter.  We don't learn a whole lot about him, except that he's hunting for the vampire who ruined his life (sounds like Mike Mignola's Baltimore), and takes out any other vampires he comes across in his search.  He has some sort of prior dealings with the Vassals, the vampire-hunting group who we often see in this title and its spin-off, and in this issue, Agent Hobbes (looking a lot like Agent Graves from 100 Bullets) tries to get him to join up with them again.

This issue starts off with an excellent sequence involving Travis's girlfriend and her parents, and it also embraces the teenage 50s, with leather jackets and drag racing in the desert.  Scott Snyder has done a wonderful job of capturing the anxieties and concerns of each era he's set his story in, and that continues to be the case here.

Albuquerque's work is, of course, wonderful.  I look forward to learning how this story ties in with Skinner Sweet's, or with Pearl and Henry's.