Graphic Novel Review: Night Trippers

joeymanley's picture

I've just updated Graphic Novel Review with a look at Mark Rickett and Micah Farritor's Night Trippers. Here's an excerpt of the review:


Detail from Night Trippers © 2006 Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor

There’s novelty packed into the edges and margins and interstices of this book, cute ideas and miniature high concepts that sound cool when described, but which don’t really serve any purpose within the larger (fairly predictable) story, except, well, to sound cool when described. For example, vampiric Beatles, mumbling “All you need is blood. Blood is all you need.” Or a bumbling octogenarian pair of vampire-hunters, who stumble out of the nursing home, and onto the scene, long enough for one of them to get killed, performing no real work in the story that couldn’t have been handled more efficiently without them. Even the most interesting character, the quasi-superhero, a vampire-killing “teddy boy” who idolizes Elvis and talks in a sort of Lenny Bruce “beatnik hip” patois, when he’s not just shouting rockabilly lyrics verbatim, is, like the two old guys, only interesting because of surface characteristics — specifically, the surface characteristics I’ve just listed. That’s pretty much all there is to him. The protagonist (or, at least, the character with whom we spend the most time throughout the course of the story — I’m not sure if she can be called a protagonist, because she’s entirely too passive and unreadable to do any agon-ning, pro- or otherwise), a working-class girl who finds herself promoted into a Twiggy-like pop star by an ancient, wealthy vampire, for reasons that are never entirely clear (he says he wants to create a legion of undead superstars for the kids to emulate, so they’ll beg to be made vampires; but then he never bothers to make our heroine a vampire — he deliberately avoids doing so, as a matter of fact), fails to engage. Until the very end, she’s nothing more than a MacGuffin for the other characters to fight over. Inexplicably, in the last couple of pages, she becomes a vampire hunter herself, complete with an unusual weapon, and an outfit that doesn’t really qualify as a superhero costume — but only just barely doesn’t qualify ... read more ...

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