In
general, Winter's Teeth is a very solid and entertaining throwback to
the Nineties Gothic Punk genre that eventually spawned things like
Underworld as well as True Blood. It is a masqued world where the
supernatural do their best to protect themselves from the prying eyes of
mortals while carrying out sinister plots against, well, mostly each
other. Vampires are fiercely competitive with one faction (The
Camarilla) having a feudal structure and the other faction (The Anarchs)
being, well, anarchic.
The comic is set within the Twin Cities
of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The cities have traditionally been
considered seperate domains but there's movement to combine them under
one single Prince who will rule them all. Completely uncaring about
these politics is protagonist, Cecily Bane, who is a former Anarch who
has allowed herself to become a traitor to the cause in order to look
after her ailing geriatric sister.
What follows is a complicated
and entertaining set of events that reminds me very much of my tabletop
RPG sessions for reasons both good as well as bad. There's a lot of
really interesting storytelling going on but I also feel like the
Storyteller (Tim Seeley in this case) occasionally throws in random
crazy stuff to spice things up. At one point, a bunch of
organ-harvesting cyborgs show up and I wondered if someone had been
using their homebrew Mage/Vampire crossover material.
Cecily is a
character that bounces between incredibly unlikable and entertaining in
equal measures, which I think is the intent. She's someone who has
become jaded on the conflicts of Anarch vs. Camarilla and it has burned
her out. Unfortunately, that means she's unwittingly making enemies and
does a few things that are just genuinely evil. Very true to the game
but sometimes I felt like I wanted to see Cecily staked and left out for
the sun.
Despite my issues, I absolutely did love the Byzantine
plots and betrayals that fill up the story. Cecily recruits a young
fledgling in hopes of restoring some of her lost humanity but secretly
having let a snake into her home. There's a lot of humor to be had from
the fact Cecily doesn't know how to deal with someone from the modern
world even though she was Embraced in the Eighties.
Really, I actually enjoyed the back-up stories a bit more than the main story and I didn't dislike the main story. The Anarchs are a wonderful collection of oddballs and misfits trying to find their place in the world. Colleen is a fantastic Thin Blooded vampire (basically more human than monster) that is trying to serve as den mother to a bunch of dysfunctional monsters.
The art is lovely with the fact that not everyone is generically cute or drop dead gorgeous. The covers are particularly eye-catching as is usual for the medium. No one is shown for pure fanservice but still appealing to look at. It helps with the sense of "realism" that the vampires could be met on the street versus being Anne Rice's demigods. Hell, even Stephanie Meyer's.
In conclusion, I really do recommend this book but with
some caveats that a slower pace might have actually been better. I
wanted to follow up Cordell's vengeance scheme and get to know the
Prince more. Vampire: The Masquerade is frequently about getting to know
the major players of a single city. Even so, I very much enjoyed this
and will be picking up the series as it continues on.
8.5/10
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