I will say, this book took me a long while to find. I was honestly expecting to find a novel or novella of some sort. Even Amazon mentioned 30 Days of Night as a paperback. What I didn’t realize was that this was a graphic novel. High focus on the term graphic.
After reading so many other books in the horror genre, I was excited to have another vampire book. This one focusing on the classical concept of vampires. Bloodthirsty creatures of the night with intelligence that rivaled our own and strength that overpowered a human’s. What I wasn’t expecting was the artwork.
I won’t say the artwork was bad for a graphic novel. It was beautiful pieces of art, but it just didn’t feel right for a graphic novel. Whenever I read a graphic novel, I like to be able to casually enjoy the visuals while reading dialogue and other text bubbles. With this book, I struggled to figure out half the time what was going on in the artwork. Other times I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the panels. Case in point, the panel you see on the left.
There were many other panels including one page where the only change in the multiple panels was the wife’s eyes closing or opening.
Looking past the awkward artwork, I did enjoy the story and plot as a whole. It built a lot of mysteries and questions about the world. Such as a mother and her son in New Orleans who are either vampire hunters or just people who want to prove their existence, and a vampire hierarchy that is ruled based on tyranny versus aristocracy. We also had a stranger to the town that was easily killed, but we never figured out if he was some kind of thrall or not.
In a way, I wished this was actually a full novella because there are still so many aspects I wish they had gone deeper into like the New Orleans family. It felt like there was a deeper story for them to go through and even more within the vampire gathering.
The one thing I really appreciated while reading was at the back of my copy there was an actual script of the comic that I could read. Sadly, it stopped a third of the way through the story. I don’t know if this was something that was intentional and more of just a little gift for readers, or if there is a way to purchase the entire screenplay. However, I don’t think I would have gotten the same feeling from reading the screenplay as I did from reading the comic. The graphics just weren’t as clear there or the danger.
So the big question stands as I have asked myself with so many other pieces. Will I keep 30 Day of Night in my collection of books? I’m honestly not sure. I don’t really collect graphic novels, nor do I care for them too much. Yet the story is really great as inspiration if I ever needed a bug for my imagination. Perhaps if I can find the screenplay, I may pick that up to replace the graphic novel just so I don’t have to stress about a headache from struggling to look at the artwork again.
