At first glance, this graphic novel might as well be another chapter of Kevin Smith’s Clerks series: Dave Miller works the counter at a convenience store, people steal merchandise right in front of him, stupid goth teenagers come in trying to include the thoroughly unimpressed Dave in their Dark Prince of the Night–style fantasies (“Ah, my dark princess, I crave sustenance,” one wanker in a velvet cloak says, just before calling the exasperated Dave a “peon”), and his cheapskate boss won’t hire anybody else to pick up the slack.
Dave is a vampire, and his eternal damnation is working at the convenience store (named The Last Stop) every night before rushing home to beat the dawn. His boss turned Dave into a vampire because he needed the cheap labor. One day, maybe, Dave will get to open up a franchise of his very own, but for now he spends most of his off time watching videos with his incredibly tolerant human roommate. This mundane concept of eternal life should strike a few existential chords with readers who have worked retail, and the story skates along as Dave finds love and struggles to find meaning in his minimum-wage lifestyle.
Abel, who’s best known for her late-’90s Fantagraphics series Artbabe, is clearly relaxing and having a little pop-culture fun here. But it’s not an artless lark, or an attempt to cash in on the recent crop of undead romance that’s springing up all over the barren young-adult publishing wasteland. Dave’s characterization is pleasantly rounded—he makes bad decisions for bad reasons, and they’re entirely understandable, which is one of the hardest things to do with fictional young adults. Though the ending of the book could use a little more fleshing out, it’s refreshing that not everything is tied neatly together and that Dave doesn’t entirely transcend his problems. Young readers who have been choking on the airy purple prose of the Twilight vampire romance series would do well to read this book and come back to earth. Abel masterfully captures the fact that it might be pretty awful down here sometimes, but there’s a lot of beauty, too.