Rating: 4/5 – Defending vampires can get a little hot sometimes.
Day Men is a great idea and we’ve had 2 great issues so far. It’s the story of the human servants for warring vampire covens who protect the interests of their vampire masters during the day (thus “Day Men”). It also has a superb creative team, written by Matt Gagnon & Michael Alan Nelson with some of the best art I’ve seen from Brian Stelfreeze.
This issue, our main protagonist David Reid (working for the Virgo clan) fights off a gang in the employ of rival Ramses vampires. A new kind of supernatural threat unlike any he’s seen before. And there is a very revealing conversation that delves into backstory that will likely become more important as time goes on.
The main problem here is the length of time between issues: #1 came out July 17, #2 hit the stands December 11th. Kind of hard to keep the story in your head with 5 months of reading comics and life in general passing by between issues. The least they could do is put a paragraph or 2 summarizing “What has gone before” on the inside of the front cover. They did not do this. To Gagnon & Nelson’s credit I was able to pick up on the story and get back into it fairly quickly, but a summary is an easy thing to do and would have greatly enhanced the reading experience for me.
Do you want it on time or do you want it to be good? Well, ideally I’d like both but if I can’t have both I’ll take “good”. This series is getting a lot of buzz. It was optioned as a film back in October. Stelfreeze’s original art for the first 2 issues of the series at full 11″ x 17″ size as part of their new PEN & INK program (kind of a mini version of the IDW Artist’s editions). I’m fully on board for this, I’d love to examine Stelfreeze’s OA at full size. That said, I think we’re going to continue to see huge gaps between issues so Stelfreeze has time to get it done the way he wants to get it done, I don’t believe he’s working at a monthly book pace.
Bottom line is that this is a great book but single issues come out very slowly. If that bother you, then you should probably wait for the trade. If you don’t mind the wait, then pick the book up monthly whenever it comes out and get treated to a great read (but please, Boom!, start putting some summary text inside the front cover for the single issue readers). And read the text page in the back of #2 to find out about a little bonus they’ll throw your way for supporting the comic in single issue format.
Reviewed by: Bob Bretall – bob@comicspectrum.com
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