Review by Steve Duin
Published May 11, 2008

I'm not into vampire tales. It's nothing personal. The genre bores me ... which, I hope, puts my fondness for Life Sucks, the new graphic novel from Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria and Warren Pleece, in perspective.

Few comics' publishers are producing with the consistency of First Second, and Life Sucks is a great edition to the catalogue. It's a romance, of course, involving Dave, the vegan vampire who works as the night manager at the Last Stop, and Rosa, who drops by the Los Angeles convenience store with the rest of the Goth crowd when the Dirge, the local juice bar, shuts down.

Those drop-ins are the highlight of Dave's otherwise miserable life. The Last Stop is run by Dave's vampire master Radu -- or Lord Arisztidecu, when he strikes an attitude -- and he's such a royal pain that Dave can never score a night off. Because Dave refuses to kill and eat people, he gets by on cans of plasma, which means he's routinely disrespected by neighborhood bloodsuckers like Wes, a surfer dude with three vampire brides.

Dave, in other words, is trying to deal with life among the undead as humanly as possible, rotating the hot dogs, making Radu happy and staying out of the sun. Unwilling to sink his teeth into the nearest neck, he's unable to indulge in the perks of the vampire life -- super hearing, stunning recuperative powers, and those aforementioned vampire brides -- and he's convinced he's a total loser dork until Rosa walks through the door with her Goth friends and vampire-poseur boyfriend.

Rosa has style, grace and a few issues of her own, including a lousy home life and a weakness for the advances of Wes, who's decided he's a little lonely with only three brides in his bed. This love triangle only gets more complicated when Rosa begins to wonder if vampires have all the luck and Dave tries to lay that naivete to rest: "What if they're not all rich? What if they have regular crappy jobs?"

The story, crafted by Abel and Soria (whom Abel thanks "for his fantastic ability to spin out tales from the paltriest of beer-sparked sparks"), is clever and funny, and benefits tremendously from not taking itself all that seriously. Warren Pleece's art clearly owes a debt to Nick Abadzis (Laika), and he gracefully acknowledges it.

And, while I'm not rushing off to read Anne Rice or Charlie Huston's turn to the dark side, I can't wait for the next graphic adventure that First Second has in store for us.