Life Sucks »

Life Sucks was written by Jessica Abel and Gabe Soria, with art by Warren Pleece. Jessica Abel is one of the foremost female comics creators in the industry. She and her husband teach courses on creating comics at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and have co-written the textbook based on their classes, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, also out this season from First Second.

The graveyard shift at a convenience store is a dead end.

Who better to work it than a vampire?

Publishers Weekly

Dave is a poor vampire, working the night shift at the 24-hour convenience store run by his vampire master, Lord Radu Arisztidescu, who thinks Dave is pretty much a wuss as a bloodsucker. Truth is, Dave would rather steal his nutrition from a blood bank than kill the innocent. But this choice leaves him weak and vulnerable to more predatory types like alpha-vampire surfer dude Wes, who's making a move on Rosa, the Latina gothic babe Dave has his eye on. There's plenty of humor with Dave's friend Jerome acting as a Clerks-like foil, coming over to Dave's work at night when the black-eyeliner crowd comes by ("the Running of the Goths"). Life Sucksalso gets a good deal of mileage out of the ironic distance between the romantic visions that Rosa and her mortal crowd have of the vampire lifestyle and the grimy reality of Dave's life as an eternal wage slave. Even if it doesn't pan out satisfactorily (the conclusion seems particularly truncated), Abel and Soria's light approach, combined with Pleece's bright, Technicolor art, gives the book an entertaining Joss Whedon gloss to its Gen-Y bloodsucking melodrama. (Feb.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.