It’s hard for people to change. Even harder for vampires.
Creative Staff:
Story: Tim Seeley
Art: Corin Howell
Letterer: Marshall Dillon
What They Say:
Charles “Chip” Ipswich isn’t one of those coastal elites with a liberal arts degree and a job at a social media start-up who knows where all the best brunch places are… No, Chip is one of the “forgotten men.” He lives in a rural area in the middle of the country where Jesus still has a place at the dinner table and where factories ship jobs to Calcutta.
Chip is also a vampire.
Stuck working the last shift at a gas station, Chip is lonely and bored…and then his dull, bleak life is turned upside down when SHE comes to town.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I’ll admit, I still like vampire stories. There are a lot of avenues to explore and always something new to do with the trappings that will be engaging under the right creative. While Tim Seeley doesn’t always strike gold with me he does have a lot of things that have worked, which made me curious about this. We also get Corin Howell on the art duties, who has something like three books coming out at the same time with this being one of them. I definitely like her style for this as it fits with the world that they’re trying to capture as there’s a kind of roughness and rawness about it, especially with the earthy and washed out color design. That lets the bigger splash moments come across even more sharply when they hit, such as the last page as someone new enters the picture.
The premise is straightforward enough as we get a little town out in the middle of nowhere named Falls End. It’s your end of the world kind of small town without a lot going for it and that’s perfect for Chip, a vampire who has lived for an indeterminate amount of time but long enough to know he wants nothing to do with the big cities where he might have freer rein. Chip harbors some issues about city folks and how they don’t know the true value of land and working it, which feels right for someone coming from a different age that wasn’t all that interested in all that glitters. Chip, however, keeps things simple with a trailer home where he sleeps under while at night he works at a convenience store – something that often keeps him there a little too late which puts him in a bad place trying to get home. We see a little of this struggle and it’s a decent way to set some of the functions of how vampires work in this world.
Chip’s life is about to get more complicated though, as we see how some other vampire is in the area and his thralls are now after him. This is amusing as they look like goth punks to some degree but there are some neat ideas, such as with them not being actual vampires they can wield holy water icicles to attack Chip with. While we don’t get a lot of story idea out of it beyond rival seeking to expand territory and local man/vampire fights back, there is a decent sense of what’s going on in the bigger picture with more of the town falling into disrepair, local economy falling apart, and just a lot of reactionary drunken elements to it. As Chip says, this is real America and what it’s all about, and you can easily imagine that he’s not going to give up what he’s staked out.
In Summary:
Tim Seeley has a standard concept setup here with what could be an interesting location since so many modern vampire stories are set in big cities or places like New Orleans or Hollywood. So there’s something to be said for a middle America vampire, which we’ve seen some of before but not for a while. The structure here gives us all the basics we need to move forward with in a clean way and you get a handle on Chip well while also seeing how he gets to feed thanks to a local woman named Evie, which makes for an intriguing relationship. Howell’s artwork is solid and captures the look of this particular place and time well and I’m definitely interested in seeing where it goes and if Seeley can tell Chip’s story while still making him sympathetic as he’s definitely got curmudgeon written all over him.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: March 20th, 2019
MSRP: $3.99
