4 out of 5

Comic gold.  GET IT?

But, y’know, not quite.  ‘Blood Brothers’ is a cheeky new edition to the vampire stable, starring two vampire friends who’ve been paling around together for a 1,000 years.  Currently – as just another job in a string of iffy ventures – they (Nick and ‘Tree’) are bounty hunters, using their super-human powers to nab the bigger bounties.  Tree is happy with their up and down lifestyle; Nick… is envious of humans.  Especially because he’s been galivanting about with a ladyfriend, Jill, despite the friends having an agreement to not keep relationships for longer than a month.  Ah, but he has a plan to become human (which isn’t the first time), and ah, this coincides with an evil vampire’s plan to use Nick’s lineage to resurrect an ancient, powerful vampire for some world domination madness.

It’s played light and breezy but never cheaply.  Nick and Tree’s history of calamities is related in a very TV flashback fashion (series of widescreen panels, each with a punchline) but because Gagerman and Waller remembered to script – and keep focus on – the fun, present day story, the past-time yuks do the job of both comedy relief and character building.  The looming crisis has a similarly smirky weight to it, but it’s all related in the same heightened atmosphere, so it works.  And there are some dramatic beats that benefit from this because of our ages-old straight man (Nick) and the jokester (Tree) setup already priming us for the former to be a bit more serious than his partner.  But the slickest thing the book does is slip in its own vampire lore without dredging up ancient histories or a page of talking heads.  Most vamps get their ‘v-card’ for not biting humans, and tend to deal with the Red Cross to buy back-alley blood.  We see some vampires get stabbed and they’re dead; we don’t need it explained much further than that.  So it’s just enough for us to enjoy a unique spin on the genre without overloading us with unnecessary details that are there just to prove that someone thought them out.

Now none of this would work without the amazing art of Evan Shaner and Dan Jackson’s perfect palette of pop colors and distinct background tones.  Shaner’s work is somewhat of the ligne claire school, blended with the naturalistic expressions of Michael Lark… meaning a great balance between realism and cartoonishness.  This has been a style popping up frequently, lately, as books look to the pulp-era for a somewhat classic style influence, but Shaner’s variation hits a very polished mark that makes the pages flow.  And I-letter-every-book-differently Nate Piekos here turns in a great, heavy font and spaces it out so that all the jokes land home, which, again, is also thanks to Shaner’s framing and pacing.

It’s hard to do funny books that are A.) actually funny and B.) also manage to be rewarding to read beyond the humor.  ‘Blood Brothers’ can sometimes be predictable or cheeky with its joke setup, but there’s so much to like about the book and characters (and so many jokes that DO land), that’s it’s easy to forgive.  Gagerman and Waller use a get-in get-out story-telling method that keeps the whole thing entertaining, and I hope the ‘The end… for now’ promise in the book’s last panel bears further fruit.