All about the books we love

Night Club, Vol. 1 by Mark Millar

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I might have been more forgiving and rounded up my 3.5 stars if a) the ending b) the cover claiming Millar reinvented the vampire genre. By having vampires fight crime? (Um, Vampire Knight?, Angel the series? P.N. Elrod's Jack Fleming, yes they're all private investigators/cops but is that so different from dressing as superheroes and doing the same thing?)

This suffered from being rushed, like Millar was writing for Netflix (I am not a fan of most streaming platforms idea that less is more and story telling suffers as they try to jam everything into 8-10 episodes) and he does, in fact, write for them. There isn't much in the way of character development. Even the one sided love triangle (eye roll) that the other two people in it don't know exists felt shoehorned in as an afterthought to give Sam something to do.

The character development is so slipshod that if not for Danny Garcia, the main point of view character, narrating a YouTube video I'm not sure we would have even known his two friends names and what they do. It opens with Sam (DJ) and Amy (artist) trying to talk Danny out of doing 'parkour' with his bike on the roof of a Philadelphia building. THey're chasing influencer money, which fine that fits their age bracket.

It ends as one might expect with Danny being seriously injured and he is targeted by a former undercover police detective who turns him to save his life. It goes straight along traditional vampire folklore traits (no sunlight (but they are awake in the day), heal from anything but burning/decapitation, turn into bats/mist, super strength etc). He trains Danny brutally for a little while because he's building an army to do something (unspecified)

Danny does have a few brain cells firing (after his stunt you had to wonder) and he devises a costume out of what looks like a luchador mask and head to toe clothing so he can go out. We get a few panels establishing that Sam (especially) and Amy are very bullied at school and when he offers them to die and be a vampire like him Amy jumps at it (Sam wasn't fully on board). Naturally we get them recording their antics as superheroes (which shows up on film because of clothing) as they work towards getting monetized.

This naturally gets the attention of both the detective and the bad guy vampires (sort of a white supremacists terrorist group) and it comes down to who is going to kill who and how. There is some good ideas in this. I just wish it had slowed down some an explored it. For example the female vampires (both of them) various 'conditions' were interesting but so little time is spent on anyone it feels like wasted opportunity.

It does wrap up the first major arc in this but then ends with Sam thinking of doing something so stupid I'm not sure I want to see more. Sigh. I did like the art a lot with one exception: the bully. I thought he was a street thug because he looked 30 not 17.



View all my reviews