Jay Faerber and Fran Bueno bring us a new series about creatures of the night and how one detective’s life is torn apart by them. Is it good?
Graveyard Shift #1 (Image Comics)
A raid by a group of officers leads to the discovery that vampires are real (not wasting any time here!).
Later, one of the cops, Liam, is enjoying a nice meal at home with his girlfriend, Hope. Unfortunately for him, it seems that the vampires are dead set on making sure that he and his police officer brethren don’t tell anyone about what they saw… or want revenge… I’m not sure.
Whatever the case, Hope gets bitten, Liam gets knocked unconscious, and a fire resulting from the ruckus shoos the other vamps out. When Liam awakens, he learns that Hope is dead. After going to visit her grave, however, he discovers that things are a bit more tragically complicated than he’d realized.
Is It Good?
To be honest, I was expecting a lot more from this issue. Don’t get me wrong; the artwork by Fran Bueno is great. Feaber also does his usual good work with dialogue, giving his characters distinct voices and intriguing interactions.
But so far, there isn’t really anything about this story that makes it stand out from the glut of vampire stories we have flooding every media market right now. Faeber may be a master world builder, but Graveyard Shift feels kind of bland.
“FREEZE! You’re under arrest for having a predictable emo-vampire haircut!”
The issue isn’t bad at all; just very derivative. We’ve already seen a ton of variations on ‘Vampire vs. Authorities’ or ‘Vampire Kills Loved One and Makes Them Return to Attack the People from Their Former Lives’.
Now to be fair, Faerber gives a hint about where the series is going in the issue’s letter page which definitely sounded interesting. So with that in mind, I’m more than willing to give the second issue a chance (especially with an excellent artist like Beueno attached to it). But if it wasn’t for Faerber’s name being slapped across the cover, I’d probably be done with the series already.
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