SUCK ON THIS
By Stephen King
Here’s what vampires
shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink
Bloody Marys and only work at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen;
anorexic teenage girls; boy-toys with big dewy eyes.
What
should they be?
Killers, honey. Stone killers who never get enough of that tasty
Type-A. Bad boys and girls. Hunters. In other words, Midnight
America. Red white and blue, accent on the red. Those vamps got
hijacked by a lot of soft-focus romance. That’s why I was so excited
when Scott Snyder—a writer I knew from his excellent book of short
stories,
Voodoo Heart—mentioned to me in an email that he was in
talks with the folks at Vertigo about doing a vampire comic series.
His take was unique, his enthusiasm infectious.
His ambition for the continuing story of Skinner Sweet (and his
victims) was awesome: nothing more or less than to trace the
emergence of America through the immortal eyes of a new kind of
vampire, one that can walk in the sun. I saw the potential for some
terrific stories, and I also liked the resonance of the thing. There’s a subtext
here that whispers powerful messages about boundless
American energy and that energy’s darker side: a grasping stop-at-nothing
hunger for money and power.
Scott wanted a blurb.
I asked him if I could write a story, instead. In fact, I wanted to
light a blowtorch and burn one in, incise it like a big ole scary tattoo.
I ended up writing the Skinner Sweet origin story, and nobody
is happier about that than I am. If you like it, don’t thank me; I wrote
it from Scott’s detailed outline, adding bells and whistles here and
there but never straying too far from his narrative line. Why fuck with
genius?
If you
don’t like it, you can blame the fact that I’m new to this
kind of storytelling. (Of course, if you don’t like it, why the heck are
you even here???) I’ve been a lifelong comics reader—cut my teeth
on
Plastic Man and
Combat Casey—but in the last fifteen years or
so, the medium has grown up. I owe great thanks to Mark Doyle,
who edits
AmVamp. It was Mark who eased me in, sending me
scripts for most excellent comix like
Northlanders and
Scalped. I
learned as much from these as I could (and re-read all of my son Joe Hill’s
Locke & Key stories), then listened humbly when I was
instructed on some of the new rules (thought balloons, I discovered,
are now passé).
It was Mark
and Scott who (with great tact) corrected my
layouts when they went wrong. And this, most of all: it was the
remarkable Rafael Albuquerque who brought our words and
descriptions to vibrant, scary life. I can’t thank him enough. As a guy
who can’t even draw stick figures, I am in awe. Seeing those panels
grow from rough sketches to finished art has been the most
rewarding thing to happen in my creative life for quite some time. I
can do story, and I can do dialogue, but the spell Rafa’s art casts
adds a whole new dimension to those things.
In the end, though, it’s all about giving back the teeth that the
current “sweetie-vamp” craze has, by and large, stolen from the
bloodsuckers. It’s about making them
scary again. Thanks, you
guys, for letting me be a part of that. Skinner Sweet really sucks, and
man, that’s a good thing.
Stephen King
May 8, 2010
King's introduction to the American Vampire hardcover
Originally Posted by pablo
Remember, Remember, The Fifth of November, The Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot.
