Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque’s American Vampire returns for one last go-’round, this time bringing the Vertigo staple to DC’s Black Label imprint and bringing the character of Skinner Sweet to the 1970s in American Vampire 1976. Against a backdrop of the post-Watergate era, Americans are distrustful of their government and fractured by political differences. The idea, it seems, is to give Snyder and Albuquerque an opportunity to comment gently on contemporary America without dealing directly with the personalities and specific policies dividing the country in 2020. According to the official release for the series, which just dropped at DC’s official website, “America is broken. Trust between the government and the American public has crumbled. Paranoia reigns supreme.”
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The nine-issue miniseries will bring the superstar creators back to American Vampire — good news for the series’ dedicated fans, who are always asking about it at convention panels! But as alluded to above, it’s the last ride for the series (at least for now), which is a bit of a bummer.
“Scott, Rafael, and I, we cut our teeth together on American Vampire 10 years ago,” said executive editor Mark Doyle. “Returning to finish the story we started a decade ago is a thrill. Working on American Vampire 1976 has been so creepy and cool, especially because the parallels between ’70s paranoia and today are really chilling.”
“The characters in ’76 are in a really dark place in terms of the fight against evil,” Snyder said in a statement. “The ’70s mirror our current era in many ways: the anxiety, the fear, and the re-examination of American identity. The book opens on Skinner Sweet working outside of Vegas doing death-defying Evel Knievel-style stunts, trying to die. There’s a kind of Son of Sam plot in New York City with Cal and Travis, a political thriller plot with Felicia, and all sorts of ’70s iconography. It’s my favorite arc so far.”
You can check out the official synopsis for the series below:
Skinner Sweet has exhausted all efforts to regain his lost immortality. With his powers and purpose gone, he is now determined to go out with a bang. At a seedy motorcycle rally in the desert where Skinner’s closer than ever to his death wish, Pearl Jones and a shocking partner track him down for one last, desperate mission: the force known as the Gray Trader and its minions are tunneling through the bowels of the world to unleash hell on Earth—just in time for America’s bicentennial. With catastrophe looming, it’s up to Skinner and Pearl to reconcile and change the course of history—or die trying.
The series that launched the careers of superstars Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque returns for nine final issues and the closing chapter of the legacy of American Vampire.
American Vampire 1976 #1 by Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque will publish on October 20, 2020, and carry DC’s Black Label descriptor, identifying the content as appropriate for readers ages 17+. The book will retail for $3.99 with cover artwork by Albuquerque and a variant cover by Dustin Nguyen.
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