It’s not set in stone, but the routine I’m trying to develop here at GNR is to offer a substantial review of one graphic novel at some point over the weekend, then, mid-week, link-blog the same book — that is, post links to other people’s reviews, along with creator interviews that have been done in support of the book, and so on.

The idea is to put my own review in context, and to provide a broader, maybe more objective, sense of what the book might be like than I can possibly offer in my own, necessarily subjective, review.

In some cases, (La Perdida, for example), there’s so much information and conversation out there on the web that I am able to be very selective in my linkage, pulling only the deepest and most intriguing stuff out of the ether for you to consider. I don’t want to just feature the books everybody’s always talking about, though — where’s the fun in that?

Night Trippers by Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor, the subject of this week’s feature review, hasn’t been as widely-discussed as many of the other books I review here. In fact, I had a hard time finding anything at all about it out there in the blogosphere. Most of the mentions of the book I did find took place before it came out: bloggers saying that they were looking forward to it, etc. Now that it’s hit the shelves, there’s not much being said. This may be because I’ve picked up this book more quickly, in terms of its conversation-generating lifecycle, than some of the others (La Perdida has been out a good, long while, for example). Or it may be that the book has had a fairly flat response all around, and the general politeness and supportiveness that “team comics” (maybe rightly, maybe wrongly) observes for non-corporate productions is mandating the silence. “If you can’t say something nice …” I dunno.

Here’s what I did find:

The Fourth Rail:

“[T]hose looking for something different in comics literature that sacrifices nothing in sheer entertainment value ought to take a look” … read more.

IGN:

“Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor’s Night Trippers offers a refreshing take on nosferatu, one that should delight every blood-sucking fan” … read more.

WordBalloon Podcast

“We turned the WordBalloon show over to Ricketts to produce this psychedelic pastiche of music and our interview to promote his new GN Night Trippers” … read more or download the MP3.

There’s a 22-page excerpt of the book over at Newsarama.com.

Mark Ricketts was interviewed by fellow comics writer Robert Tinnell (Sight Unseen) on the Image Comics blog. Surprisingly enough (to me, anyway), Ricketts says that his primary motivation wasn’t the desire to tell a vampire story, or to create a quasi-superheroic franchise:

When I started this book, I mostly wanted to write the story of a fabricated pop idol. Not like the corporate creations of today, but the artistic visions of some Svengali. Like when Justin De Villeneuvre transformed a skinny young schoolgirl into a world-wide sensation named Twiggy. Or like Brian Epstein who packaged four scruffy, leather-jacketed, working class Liverpool lads as tailored, mop-topped teen dreamboats. … read more

Title: Night Trippers Creators: Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor Publisher: Image Comics

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The first time I read Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor’s Night Trippers, three days ago, it slid without friction across my consciousness so smoothly that, flipping through it again this morning, preparatory to writing this review, I found that I had pretty much forgotten everything about it, except for the largest details. It’s about vampires in London during the swinging sixties. The characters have big heads and big eyes, but otherwise look more P. Craig Russellish than mangaesque. And, um, well, that’s about all that I could remember.

Detail from Night Trippers © 2006 Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor

Even re-reading random pages to try to catch the drift of the story again didn’t help. What was supposed to be happening here, and here, and here? It’s not that the story was too complicated. It’s that the story wasn’t complicated enough to make any lasting impression. To be fair: the problem might be mine. I’ve been reading too many graphic novels lately. For every one I actually end up reviewing, I’m reading four or five that I can’t think of anything to say about. So there’s that. Reading the book all the way through again a couple of hours ago, I found it reasonably enjoyable, just like I think I did the first time, but I’m still not sure that I’ll remember it in three more days (except that I’ll remember writing this review, which will probably cause it to stick out in my mind more than it would otherwise).

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.

As in the very weakest of Warren Ellis (whose work, I should mention, I mostly adore, but who does misfire occasionally), the high concept and clever conceit, the “hey, look, I’m playing with genre conventions while standing above them — here’s a cool scene, explodo, whatever, and look how funny this character talks while making the fisticuffs” attitude, though cheeky enough to divert one’s attention briefly, cannot stimulate the mind longer than it takes to read through the book.

Detail from Night Trippers © 2006 Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor

Other than that, there’s nothing in particular wrong with Night Trippers. And there’s quite a bit that’s right. On a moment-by-moment, panel-by-panel basis, you’ll find yourself more or less pleased, while you’re reading it. The pencil-and-paint artwork, though it has its awkward moments, also possesses a kind of angular stylishness that works nicely for the vampire genre. One especially outstanding little touch is purely formal: the way that interior monologues are handled — inset panels, colored in a reddish tone to distinguish them from the “real-time” story, featuring the characters speaking directly to the camera about what they are thinking, like they’re in a Shakespeare play, or a reality television show — allows the use of verbose and expository “thought balloon” language without coming across as cheesy or old-fashioned (imagine the scene above if the thoughts were coming out of the old man’s head in the form of a thought balloon — it would have been too much, Stan Lee City all the way, daddy-o).

There’s something here, to be sure. It just hasn’t quite come together yet. It’s entirely possible that, freed from the demands of introducing their milieu and creating an “origin story” for their quasi-superhero, Ricketts and Farritor could potentially return to their franchise (if such it is to be) and enlarge, expand, and deepen it so that it could become very interesting indeed (in the same way that Bill Willingham’s Fables, for example, has become a much more well-written, engaging series, over time, than its first volume — an easy-to-solve, cliched murder mystery with a fairy tale twist, complete with an Ellery-Queen-like “parlor scene” — seemed to promise).

If you read a lot of graphic novels (like I do), there’s no reason not to pick up this one. It’s a decent enough way to spend some time; it’s not very expensive, as color trade paperbacks go; and the creators are probably going to go on and do even more interesting work in the future, either together or separately, either within this series or not. Otherwise, if you’re only going to read one graphic novel this year — or even this month — this isn’t necessarily the one I’d recommend that you snatch off the shelves first.

Title: Night Trippers Creators: Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor Publisher: Image Comics

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!