American Vampire: Survival of the Fittest #5 – Review

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

The Story: Cash and Felicia try to escape from the Nazi vampires with a “cure” for vampirism.

Review: This was a very satisfying conclusion to this AV miniseries.  It ties up most of the action from this story of American agents working for the Vassals of the Morning Star and their infiltration Nazi-occupied Europe in the late 1930’s, and the unresolved issues will make ample fodder for future AV stories.

This miniseries also really cemented for me what kind of series AV is.  For awhile, I wondered what AV was about in the sense that a series like Transmetropolitan was about Spider Jerusalem’s quest to take down the Smiler or how Planetary was about Elijah Snow’s mission to stop the Four and save Ambrose.  If AV has an over arching story like that, it is slower to develop (think 100 Bullets), but I think it could just be like Y the Last Man where it isn’t so much about the individual missions, but more a study of what happens when you create a certain type of world: What if vampires existed and what if the founding of a new country (the USA) also saw the founding of a new race of vampires?  What would they be like?  How would they interact with humans?  With other vampires?  How does the status quo change with this new race?  I think that’s the kind of ride we’re on.

Getting back to this issue, the opening “escape from the castle” scene is more of a prolonged action scene than I think we’ve ever seen from Snyder and he and Murphy pull it off very nicely even if a motorcycle chase is a waste of Snyder’s writing skill.  [As an aside, comic fandom too often uses the term “good writing” to mean “comes up with neat ideas for a comic book”.  That isn’t writing.  Writing is taking that concept and transforming it into a series of words that are engaging to read and this is an area where Snyder is way ahead of the average comic book writer.  Compare that to a dude like Marv Wolfman who had ideas coming out of his ears, but couldn’t write a lick.]  Still, it’s a fun scene that moves the action along and Murphy draws the hell out of it, even if it doesn’t make Snyder exert himself very much.