American Vampire: Survival of the Fittest #3 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Sean Murphy (artist), Dave Stewart (colors), Pat Brosseau (letters), Joe Hughes (assistant editor) and Mark Doyle (editor)

The Story: Cash & Felecia’s mission to Nazi-occupied Europe looks bleak as the Nazis have been revealed to be league with vampires.

What’s Good: Everything about this issue is good (again) and that’s almost expected with these creators.  When we last saw our heroes, the curtain had been lifted on the collaboration between the Nazis and the vampires.  This issue details how Cash and Felecia deal with that information.

One of the things that Snyder has been doing throughout American Vampire is playing with the different races of vampires.  Other writers of vampire stories have fiddled with that, so it isn’t new, but Snyder does some very cool things with it.  For example, not only does this issue have “vampire Nazis” in it, but they aren’t just vampires that have been drafted into Nazi service OR Nazis that were turned into vampires.  These vampires have just as many ethnic/genetic superiority issues as their human counterparts. Like the Nazis, they believe that they are the master race of vampires!  It’s touches like this that put Snyder on another level.  Not only is he talented, but he also gives a crap!  Most writers would have been happy to stop at “Nazi vampires” knowing that a sizable segment of the readership will just say, “Whoa!  Nazi vampires?  Cool, sign me up!”  And this story probably could have worked fine that way, but Snyder is always looking for ways to add a new wrinkle to the story.

The rest of the story is more Snyder goodness as the set-up exposition starts to fall away and we shift into action mode.  This plays up the whole superspy/espionage feel from the first two issues of the series and moves the story very quickly to the next set-piece.  This series isn’t letting up at all.