Today, I’m excited to reveal a 3 page preview (from Pearl's story written by Scott Snyder) from AMERICAN VAMPIRE #1 and a piece by Scott Snyder on his Favorite Vampires.
If you've seen the pages that were posted on THE DAILY BEAST yesterday, the guy hanging by the pool just might look familiar. But isn't it the 1920's?
Now, like I said yesterday, don’t walk. Run to pick up a copy tomorrow. In the meantime, find out a bit more about creator and co-author Scott Snyder and his favorite vampires.
Scott Snyder on his favorite vampires:
It's funny, when I got the question - who are your top 7 favorite vampires? - I started to list my favorite vampire movies. And if I had to make that list, it would look something like this:
Near Dark
Lost Boys
Salem's Lot
Fright Night
Nosferatu
Let the Right One In
Dracula (both the original and the Bram and the Coppola one for its crazy excess)
30 Days of Night as a bonus
I was about to send the list over, when I realized that the question was favorite vampires. Not vampire movies. So I started thinking, and I realized that basically all my favorite vampires come from the top few movies on the list. Ralphie Glick floating outside his brother's window, scratching at the window, grinning. Lance Henrickson as Jesse Hooker - who answers the question: How old are you? with the line: I fought for the South. Bill Paxton is maybe my favorite of all time, Severen, who's about to bite a biker and says: I hate it when they ain't been shaved. And the vampire women - secret crushes of my youth - Jami Gertz as Star, and Jenny Wright as the entrancing Mae.
When I think about it, these are my favorites, the vampires from Near Dark, Lost Boys and Salem's Lot, and the reason - I think - is that they represented something new and newly scary when I was a kid. They weren't the old vampires with slicked back hair and accents shuffling around castles on clifftops in some far away land. They were vampires re-imagined as scary and modern things. Young, sexy, sociopathic, sometimes conflicted, sometimes evil, always so real. In Salem's lot, the people you know are turned into the evil undead - your neighbors, your brother, your girlfriend... Barlow is very scary, don't get me wrong, with that Nosferatu mug - but even scarier is your best friend knocking at your window, come to kill you. The vamps in Lost Boys were cool to me when I was a kid (mullets and all, I admit it) - they were modern and bad-ass and I wanted to be like them. And Near Dark (probably the biggest influence on AMERICAN VAMPIRE) features vampires that are like modern-day serial killers, terrifying drifters that could show up at your door at any moment in that blacked out Winnibego.
Basically, I guess my favorite vampires are the ones that actually seemed like they might walk the landscape I lived in, when I was a kid. Vampires that were homegrown, part of the community, the neighborhood, the American landscape. And in a big way, this is what we're trying to do with AMERICAN VAMPIRE; we're trying to make the scariest, coolest, most bad-ass vampires to date by offering up a brand new species of the things. A species that lives in your town, your city, walks by day (doesn't wear leather pants or turtlenecks or black trenchcoats or crouch brooding on gargoyles over the rain-soaked city). A stronger, meaner species that stalks every decade of modern American history. Hope you enjoy.
