American Vampire #18 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Rafael Albuquerque (artist), Dave McCaig (colorist), Pat Brosseau (letterer), Joe Hughes (assistant editor) & Mark Doyle (editor)

The Story: The final issue of the WWII/Pacific-theatre story is here.  Some folks will survive and some won’t.

What’s Good: I’m going to pick at a few things below, but overall….this is another strong entry for the award-winning series.  The big event of this issue is the showdown between Pearl and Skinner.  Not only is this a fight between the two American Vampires (that we know of), but there’s all kinds of residual and complex issues going on between the two: Pearl is defending her human husband and probably has some issues with the fact that Skinner made her a vampire in the first place….Skinner also reveals that he has some issues with Pearl that go beyond him just being a jackass.  So, there is a lot more to this fight than mere fisticuffs.  You’ll just have to read it, but it makes clear why Skinner has been on the lookout for Pearl and Henry for decades and why he has it in for Henry.

We also get a few cool cliffhanger events in this issue.  One major character sure seems dead, but this being comics, you can’t really be sure.  It seems like we have closure on the island of feral Japanese vampires, but since it happens off-panel, we can’t be entirely sure of what happened.  There is a really cool cliffhanger final panel where we might have a new American Vampire, and you have to wonder what that’ll mean for Pearl.  AND, there is even a major character who might be vampirized too.  He did get bitten and nothing is really said about the bite (although a full panel is devoted to it), so I guess we’ll just have to see.

There is even another example of Snyder not taking the easy way out of a scene.  At one point, the protagonists are tossed into the ocean with the feral vampires below them and Snyder comes up with a very cool reason why the vampires can’t just swim up to grab them.  I love the way Snyder takes this neat idea and just tosses it away after a page because it makes me feel confident for the future of the series.  Weaker writers construct 6-issue stories around this sort of idea, but Snyder uses it for a page and then moves on.