STRAIN

I’ll begin with a warning. Even the title of “The Strain: The Night Eternal” is something of a spoiler, so if you’re watching the show or reading one of the earlier volumes, you might not want to read this review until you’re done. As the issue opens, The Master has succeeded in remaking the world to best serve vampires, with nuclear winter, a huge strigoi population and a police state to control the humans. Lapham spends most of the issue catching up with familiar characters — Vasily, Ephraim and Nora — and establishing the new status quo, but it doesn’t feel like a slow recap. With lived-in dialogue, smart pacing, and commentaries on everything from mass media to fascism, “The Strain: The Night Eternal” #1 is one heck of a kickoff. Lapham and Huddleston grab the reader at the get-go, opening with an almost dialogue-less vampire origin story for The Master. It’s a clever way to keep the pace up; the post-Fall universe of “The Strain” is pretty dreary, and a violent, attention-grabb

This comic adaptation of a novel by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan is proving to be a sleeper success. As far as horror comics go, “The Strain” has the right atmosphere, a very pleasant attachment to these new characters, and a set up for violence and terror that will leave you needing to know what comes next. This is a successful jaunt into the darker end of comics. This issue ends with everything ready to be soaked in blood; the time spent setting it all up means you will actually care. A flight had landed with the plane silent and all passengers dead, or so we supposed. Turns out there were three survivors, each more different than the last. The most interesting one, Ansel Barbour, is the one we follow closest. He’s an emotional mess who talks through his every thought of the most random worst case scenario. He’s the sort of guy you most definitely would not want to be next to at 40,000 feet. He’s a funny injection to this tale and yet by issue’s end you know his narrative arc

“The Strain” is based on a vampiric novel series co-written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. The cinematic chops of Del Toro should surely get fans through the door on this venture, especially for a $1 price tag, and certainly for those who like his movies but couldn’t sit through a trilogy of books. David Lapham and Mike Huddleston both stay true to the source material while making this comic book their own. This debut issue bucks a common trend by elaborating far more on the characters than the set up of the tale. Where many drop the high concept in as the hook for the audience and have characters present to be explored later, “The Strain” wants us to know and care about our main players, and leaves us with a few wicked hints of where things are going. I applaud this effort because any horror story is only as good as the people the horror endangers. I already care about our scientific lead and the familial worries that no doubt await him. This is a smart way to draw the read