Review: Life Sucks

Comments Off | Posted: May 16th, 2008 | Filed under: Uncategorized

I’ve never been a fan of Jessica Abel’s work. Yes, she’s a very accomplished cartoonist with no small amount of brain matter that she devotes to thinking about the medium, but everything she’s done so far has left me cold, mostly because I really don’t care much for reading about pretty, overprivileged 20-and-30-somethings who go to exotic places and still manage to be simultaneously vapid and precious.

This view of her work, of course, made me immediately biased against Life Sucks, co-written with the (affable as all hell) Gabe Soria with art by Warren Pleece, so I was very pleasantly surprised with this mostly charming, frequently witty, and overall well-done graphic novel in which convenience-store employee (and vampire) Dave Mitchell finds himself smitten with a goth girl who fetishizes his lifestyle and, as is the wont of fiction, complications ensue. Even if the only new ground broken in the book (at least to me) is the working-class vampire lifestyle in California, Life Sucks manages to be an lively, engaging beach read on the strength of the characters and lovely art by Warren Pleece (who gets better every year.) While I rooted for Dave and hissed at surfer-boy Wes, it’s telling that the bits that stand out a day after reading it involve Dave’s boss (a Romanian expat who enslaved him a few years before when needing a new clerk for his Last Stop convenience store) and the tiny things, like Blood Brew and the vampire diner the cast hangs out in.

Still, not bad, and the perfect bit of froth that may help get people that are currently Buffy-only comics readers to check out something new. I mean, it’s got vampires and shit in it, right?

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