30 DAYS OF NIGHT

By STEVE NILES, BEN TEMPLESMITH (IDW Publishing; 2003)

         Please understand: I like this heavily influential, award-winning graphic novel a fair amount, but don’t love it.  Put another way, I feel it’s a good book, but not a great one.

            Such distinctions are important when discussing 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, which has received a myriad of overenthusiastic notices since its 2003 inception as a three-part comic series.  It’s since been spun off many times over (most recently in the ’07 movie adaptation, which is set to be sequalized).  I’ll admit my less-than-ecstatic reaction may be due to the fact that it’s taken me a while to get around to reading the thing; in the meantime I’ve been bombarded with the overpowering buzz that made it out to be the greatest thing to happen in the comics medium...ever.

            Like I said, though, it’s a good, satisfying tale of vampire mayhem.  It has an intriguing premise positing that a band of centuries-old vamps take up residence in a small Alaskan town where the night lasts thirty days, thus affording them a prime opportunity to wreak bloody havoc without worrying about sunlight spoiling their fun.  As one bloodsucker opines: “I don’t know why we never thought of it (before)”.

            The story is tightly wound and action-packed, the setting compelling and appropriately claustrophobic, and the artwork by Ben Templesmith rendered in arrestingly off-kilter fashion, with stark, concentrated splashes of color amidst a desolate nighttime landscape.  Without question, this is a sleek, slick and skilled piece of work all around.

            But getting back to the deafening buzz surrounding the project, let me take this opportunity to puzzle over Clive Barker’s laudatory introduction, which makes me wonder if he even read the same book.  Barker raves about how the writing evokes “a cold, joyless world in which appetite can never be sated, and love gives no comfort, even in the bright light of day.  Especially then.”

            Huh?  In most respects 30 DAYS OF NIGHT is an utterly conventional account of good guys (mortals) vs. bad guys (vampires)--and I wouldn’t dare reveal which side wins out.  There’s even the expected heroic sacrifice in the final pages--wherein one of the mortals injects himself with vampire blood but somehow remains a good guy--which does seem to negate Barker’s promise of a “Bitter, Bitter end.”

            Bottom line: this graphic novel is good, fast, gory fun.  But a groundbreaking masterpiece it’s not.