Bite Club #3 Review

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Reviewer: James Hatton
Story title: N/A

Writer: Howard Chaykin & David Tischman
Artist: David Hahn
Letters: Jared K. Fletcher
Colors & Seps: Brian Miller
Editor: Shelly Bond
Publisher: Vertigo

If I was a vampire, I would hope it was much more like a Bite Club style vamp than most of the other styles. The Dusk Til Dawn ones hung out at cool bars, but generally were quick to kill. The Lost Boys ones were too drab and suburban. The Buffy vamps were acceptable, as the smart ones kept getting to stake Sarah Michelle Geller, but overall they too were just mindless foot soldiers of the undead to be put to eternal rest.

The vampires of Bite Club are just normal outcasts of society. The vampires that our story revolves around, are the Soprano response to White Wolf gaming. No mopey little pale faces all sitting around a new interview from Robert Smith, and generally not a helluva lot of whining about how miserable life is. These are the vampires I like.. ones with style.. ones with guns.. and if I could keep track of what the hell was going on – I’d ask how I could join up.

Story

There is quite a bit going on in this book. Leto is a priest who seems to be moving into the head of the Del Toro family since his pop died. Eddie is the mover and shaker, he’s your guy who gets things done (want them or not). Risa is the young rebel daughter. Danny is Eddie Jr.’s son, and there are a couple of other characters who are all part of the Del Toro mob family.

In six issues, they are either going to A: Solve all subplots or B: Make you wonder what the point of it all was. I have a hope that it is (A), since the writing is pretty decent. The scene jumping feels quite a bit like you are in the middle of an episode of one of those big ‘I Buy Them In Box Set’ shows (Six Feet Under, Sopranos, 24), but the transitioning doesn’t work as well for this particular book. It makes everything seem rushed, which is sad, because if this book was given a little more time to pace itself out, it would make a phenomenal ongoing. There just aren’t that many comics about vampires and mob bosses.

Art!

The feeling of each scene is defined by its colors. The key, I learned, to realizing when you’ve jumped from scene to scene is by the scope of color which changes quite readily. We go from a brown toned scene in court, to a red toned scene at Leto’s home. It’s a different way of telling what’s going on, but as I said above, it seems a bit choppy without any descriptives.

The character work is excellent. This book wouldn’t be good with extreme amounts of detail going into each face, scene, wall, etc. It lets you fill those in all on your own, and does it perfectly and relies on the color to describe everything you don’t see. A good style indeed.

On a complete aside – the covers have nothing to do with the book, but they are so great to look at.

Overall!

Where Bite Club isn’t grabbing me the way I wanted it to, it certainly isn’t a horrible book. It just seems that it has the problem of having such an amount to tell you, but knowing it’s limited to those six issues. I might be missing out entirely, but the sub-plot of Risa is still flying past my head. Also, the fact that Leto will openly question his faith when it comes to sex, yet freely accept that he is in line to run a drug-selling, murdering, illegal gambling mob only phases him enough to flip a coin. It just doesn’t seem 100% consistent, but then again, maybe this is the depth of the character that they are trying to push into the slice of life we are given.

I recommend this book for folks who dig those aforementioned TV box sets, but don’t jump into this expecting light reading, as the plot is woven so tight, you blink and you might miss something important.