Walrus Comix Book Review
Life Sucks
Written by Jessica Abel and Gabe Soria
Illustrated by Warren Pleece|Colored by Hillary Sycamore
First Second Books, Paperback / $19.95

It may be a work of fantasy, but anyone who’s worked in minimum wage retail will get a shudder of recognition in the pages of Life Sucks. In a small stroke of genius, Life Sucks finds the exact parallels between one existence as a convenience-store night manager and one as a new vampire thrall, and plays on them to draw the reader in.  A pure distillation of that post-collegiate time of the dead end job and the perverse inversion of pay to responsibility, which can definitely make you feel as though dutiful centuries of empty existence under fluorescent lights lie behind and ahead.

The story, set in the endless summer of Southern California, focuses on Dave, night manager at a 24-hour convenience store.  Through flashbacks, we learn that Dave’s not just an employee but a thrall to the owner, who happens to be a straight-up old country Vampire named Radu (who insists that he be addressed as “Lord Arisztidescu”).  Radu can directly bend Dave to his will with Vampire Lord powers, but mostly Dave – an ideal wage slave with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility to begin with -  just does what he’s asked without the mystic whammy.

As Life Sucks opens, Dave has become resigned to his dreary non-existence, even finding a small measure of – if not joy, exactly – at least a kind of contentment with his few friends and the secure predictability.  Of course, what Dave is avoiding are the twin poles of hope and despair, and these enter the story in the person of a stunning Chicana girl named Rosa.  Rosa runs with a crowd of Vampire wannabes who believe in the romanticized Anne Rice myth of vampirism as, essentially, a sexy fashion show with accents and fangs - unaware that the real thing are all around them, serving their coffee and making their copies.

Naturally, Dave lacks the confidence to talk to Rosa at first. But he’s driven into action first by his friends – mostly vampires, with one token human – and then by the threat of being outmaneuvered in Rosa’s affections by Wes, a fellow thrall to Radu.  Wes is everything Dave is not – tall, handsome, muscular, wealthy, at ease with himself and successful with women.  Unlike in real life, where the comically mismatched Wes and Dave wouldn’t even be aware of each other, servitude under Radu puts them in direct and constant contact – and, hence, at odds.  Since Wes revels in the power and freedom of his new condition and Dave is largely ashamed of it, Wes leaves Dave outmatched and enjoys doing so.  To put it mildly, Wes is a total scary asshole in the best Biff Tannen way, an unstoppable force who seemingly makes it the point of his existence to turn Dave’s purgatory into an undead hell at every turn.

Abel and co-Author Gabe Soria do an excellent job of outlining their characters and scenario in as few strokes as possible, instead relying on the reader’s existing knowledge of the genre to fill in the blanks and keep things moving along.  Which is a good thing – with a genre piece, and Vampire tales in particular, there’s always a danger that the focus will fall on the writer’s ideas about the mechanics of the Vampire myth – is it a curse? A simple blood disorder? - and the rules that govern their existence, and blah, blah, blah.  All of which invariably drag a story down and make for flat and uninteresting characters.  The authors here know that the characters are what’s really going to separate a good Vampire novel from a depressing quasi-TSR RPG exercise, so they make them as flawed, sympathetic and human as possible.

Smartly, the rules of Vampirism as presented in Life Sucks are here largely for satirical effect in a story that’s a character driven piece.  In fact, it could be classified as a love story, or a coming of age story, or any number of other classifications, but the fact is that Life Sucks is a genre unto itself, a slacker/horror/romance/comedy/buddy novel. 

In many ways, the last thing it really has on its mind is Vampirism – although Abel and Soria’s take on the subject seems to be pretty close to the Watchmen paradigm of ‘what happens if this fantastical thing were real?’  To their credit, they actually do manage to bring a strong feeling of verisimilitude to the proceedings.  No doubt, a good part of this stems from Abel’s seminal Artbabe stories from the 90’s, probably the high watermark of naturalistic short fiction in comics.

The story mechanics are much tighter here than in Abel’s previous attempt at long-form storytelling, La Perdida.  Where La Perdida (at least in serial format) tarried long with occasionally dull characters and meandered without focus before taking a left turn into Donenesque intrigue at the 11th hour, Life Sucks effectively and economically sets up the milieu and conflicts and gets rolling quickly.

One supposes that some credit for that goes to co-author Soria and illustrator Warren Pleece.  The dialogue is crisp and memorable and individual scenes have been trimmed of all excess fat.  Pleece follows suit by giving us a clean line and uncluttered world, without sacrificing an ounce of mood and sense of place – two indispensable ingredients in a Vampire novel. A very nice balance is struck between longer dialogue-driven scenes and shorter action scenes, and Pleece’s Ditko-like ability to pace scenes and craft a believable environment is equally adept at rendering both talking and throat-ripping without having to strain for effect.

The one complaint: it’s clear that Abel has long preferred to script dialogue-only, being part of the wave of comics auteur in the 90’s that saw the similarities between comics and film effects and moved to exploit them. And while excessive use of redundant captions and internal monologue can quickly become exasperatingly silly – rereading any later Claremont X-Men illustrates this danger – a strict fealty to the dialogue-and-visuals-only approach makes characters strain to give readers necessary exposition. 

Too, transitions occasionally leave the reader puzzling out just how abutting scenes relate.  It’s several pages into one scene with a group hanging out at a diner before we realize that the female in the group is, in fact, not Rosa, but another character  - Asian, this time - we haven’t yet met.  Which wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that Dave has deliberately not disclosed the fact of his vampirism  - or even the existence of same - with Rosa, and in the diner scene, it appears as if he’s discussing it openly in front of her. 

Certainly, some of the blame for this could fall on Pleece, who excels at storytelling but has a limited repertoire of faces and body types, but when a) an artist is given a directive to draw a group conversing, he generally won’t waste a panel on a second-tier character without dialogue, and b) the scene in question follows one in which Rosa features prominently, the fault lies largely with the writers’ chosen format.  Again, citing Ditko – a brilliant artist who didn’t have a wide menagerie of faces – there’s no shame in dropping in a short caption now and then or otherwise textually providing the reader with information that isn’t clear in the drawing.  If it’s good enough for Lee and Ditko, it’s probably good enough for Life Sucks.

Still, this is a very, very minor quibble in what is really a quite entertaining and thoughtful read, and one that could be recommended to teen readers of both genders.  In fact, it would make a very effective gateway drug to American comics for the young Shojo fan in your life, so buy several, then hang out in the Manga section at Borders and hand them out to every teenage girl you see.  Sure, you might get arrested (or at the very least ejected), but we all should do what we must to help the artform survive.

- David Kopperman: Cartoonist Extraordinaire, Songwriter, Musician, Walrus Comix Journalist and Roving Fireman