Undying Love 1

This is an impressive debut issue. The mode is sort of Buffyish, a horror vampire adventure story, though without any of the humour, and for once the attempt to step into that peerless territory doesn’t make your heart sink.

The team co-write, Coker draws, Freedman colours. The story is set in China and Hong Kong, focussing on a white tough guy with a beautiful Chinese vampire girlfriend. It seems in this mythos, she can be cured by consuming the heart of the vampire who made her one, who turns out to be the oldest and mightiest in the land. There is other stuff happening too, featuring a fox spirit and ancient warriors – it gives the impression that they have plenty of material sketched out, though clearly there is a quest with a final goal here. The dialogue is tidy, restrained, clipped, often noirish, and while the main two characters don’t seem to amount to too much so far, there’s an excellent wise man which gives me some optimism that they can do character.

But what lifts it above a competent and promising comic is the lovely art. Coker can genuinely draw – he has the very rare ability to make faces and buildings and so on look as if they are copied really carefully and with great technical skill from photographs, but without any hint of the usual downside of stiffness in composition, movement and flow. His faces have plenty of expression and emotion, quite a few being among the best realistic comic faces I’ve seen in ages (there are two absolute gems on page 10, for instance, and all of them on page 8, pictured, are terrific). With that realism and some aspects of the timings and rhythms, it strikes me as one of the most genuinely cinematic (a much abused term in comic discourse, but I think it is apt here) comics I’ve ever seen. This is helped by an exceptional control of tone and visual mood, both via (presumably computerised) zipatone and texturing and thanks to highly sensitive, muted colouring, heavy on sepia and grey. The overall effect is distinctive, but it did remind me somewhat of some of Gray Morrow’s best work, which is very high praise. Maybe a little reminiscent of some realistic newspaper strip art too, perhaps something like Jim Holdaway on Modesty Blaise – there’s even something I can’t quite define about the graceful toning that made me think of David Wright’s lushly lovely work on Carol Day, though I suspect others may not go along with that, as the technical approach is so different.

I rarely buy comics for art ahead of writing, but the writing here is at least fine and has potential, and the art is often genuinely beautiful, and certainly strikingly effective at conveying the atmosphere and feeling of the story and characters. I just looked up Coker, someone I knew nothing about, and it turns out he has directed some, as well as worked plenty in comics – I may look out some previous work, as he impresses me immensely here.