Sleep Is For the Weak

Rated 13+ for…I dunno, violence, darkness; official website

Ah, vampire stories. Few genres make me more cynical, more skeptical. This isn’t to say there aren’t good vampire stories out there – I quite enjoyed Vampire Game, and found Rebirth pretty entertaining. Even that awful Hollywood movie about the queen of the vampires – can’t think of the name right now, but there was a vampire rock star with leather pants – was at least entertaining in a MST3K sort of way. But anyone who wants to write a modern vampire story has to overcome the flaws of the genre if they want it to be any good. Record of a Fallen Vampire is a lovely, well-put-together story that unfortunately falls into all the worst stereotypes of vampiric tales.

Vampires never enjoy themselves. You’d think never dying and having magic powers would be good for at least a little fun every now and then, but vampires are always so caught up in how miserable they are for being vampires that they never seem to have a good time. The vampires of this comic – both the vampire king and the half-human-half-vampire dhampires who try to track him down – practically never crack a smile. Every conversation, every thought that passes through a character’s head is treated like it’s incredibly serious and grave. To be fair, the lives of these characters all suck. The ones who aren’t dying can instead never die, and thus suffer torment forever. But there’s not any clear point to all this suffering, besides making the characters look dramatically sad and gothy while they stand on rooftops in the moonlight, wearing ridiculous capes and kimonos and fluffy dresses and blowing each other up with fireballs. No fewer than three of the characters have pretty much the same angsty backstory – they’re all pining for a love they lost to death, non-reciprocated feelings, or crazy magical seals. Yes, it sucks to lose a love. No, it’s not okay for that to be the only thing that defines three of your characters, and for them to be constantly angsty about it 50, 100, or 1,000 years later.

Plenty of people in real life are serious, or caught up in past trauma, or even actually depressed. There are interesting things to be found in stories about people with those kinds of personalities. But that’s where vampire stories run up against their second problem – vampires are always cool. Not “talented” cool or “relaxed and charismatic” cool, but fashion model, stand-around-looking-beautifully-bored cool. There’s no way to get deep characterization out of characters like that. Hell, there’s no way to get shallow-yet-still-entertaining characterization out of characters like that. And since Record of a Fallen Vampire is set up less as an ongoing plot than character development punctuated by lengthy fight scenes, interesting characterizations are vital. To be fair, not every character in the series falls into the usual vampire stereotype – some of them fall into overused manga stereotypes, too. We’ve got the cutesy moe girl who’s more a mascot than a character, and who’s written as the comic relief by someone who can’t actually write comedy. Then there’s the brash, angsty bishounen who’s out for revenge and screws up everyone’s plans by being an irrational hothead. The single interesting character – the only one who isn’t torn up by angst every minute of every day – is killed off in volume one and replaced by another dead-serious angst magnet, and that character’s death drives another character to become much more serious and upset at everything. The whole situation also killed any kindness I might have harbored for this comic.

Seething criticism of the characters aside, the storytelling is the main strength of this book. After reading the back cover, I’d expected a story with such a complex premise to be told awkwardly, but the artist and writer worked together beautifully to tell their story clearly and concisely from the very beginning. The art is lovely, and even when it’s too busy for my taste it’s still always clear what’s going on. Information is given to the reader at just the right speed and in just the right order to make everything make sense, to set up suspense and hint at revelations to come. It just isn’t really worth it, considering the cast.

In the interest of full disclosure: Volume two of this manga was given to us by Viz, along with a bunch of other stuff to review. This is the first time we’ve received review copies from anyone. I think it’s probably clear from the meanness of this review that the promise of free stuff isn’t affecting our ability to be incredibly nitpicky.

Initial impression: Don’t bother. (NotHayama)

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