I thoroughly enjoyed the first two issues of 30 Days of Night. Niles had a great but wonderfully simple idea for a vampire story and ran with it. After aside from the actual premise, it didn't seem like the series held much in the way of surprises. Entertainment, yes. Suprises, no.
I was wrong.
I figured we were in for a typical humans-team-up-to-fight-the-monsters plot. Aliens, only with vampires, you know. But instead, Niles hits us with a fight-fire-with-fire riff. It's a chilling read, and Templesmith's distorted, angular, hazy art drives that tense atmopshere home.
The vampires have begun to set the town Barrow, Alaska ablaze, determined to erase any evidence of their existence. But they have more than dead bodies to cover up... they must also track down and eliminate the remaining survivors. The fate of the remaining humans is in the hands of the town sheriff, and he's only seen one thing so far that can kill a vampire. He needs to harness that for his own purposes... and for the survival of the others.
Templesmith combines sharp jagged edges with bloated, organic curves to create disturbing visuals that elevate the horror story to an entirely more disturbing level. The vampires aren't just monsters here; they're depicted as collections of chaos. At first glance, the painted artwork looks to be in black-and-white, but there are subtle injections of color. Of course, in key scenes those subtle injections explode, and the bigger splashes of color really make an impact as a result.
At the beginning of the story, Niles included an external force, a wild card in an otherwise two-sided conflict. That wild card really ends up having little impact on the plot, but the unanswered questions left behind from the loose thread plant the seed for a followup story.
Niles has been writing comics for a while now, doing plenty of work in the world of Todd McFarlane's Spawn characters. But it's 30 Days of Night that really put him on the map. Deservedly so. This stands out as Niles's best work, and I plan to add it to my bookshelf when the inevitable trade-paperback collection is released.
