The Strain #1

Special $1 introductory issue released a few weeks ago.

Title: The Strain
Issue: 1
Date: 2011
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Guillermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan, David Lapham
Artist: Mike Huddleston
Letterer: Clem Robins
Colorist: Dan Jackson
Editor: Jim Gibbons, Sierra Hahn

Comic adaptation of the first novel of a trilogy by film director Guillermo Del Toro and writer Chuck Hogan. David Lapham adapts the story to script.

The opening flashback is standard vampire fare, with a young boy in Romania in 1927 hearing a local legend from his grandmother.

Flash forward to the present and there's a plane quarantined on the tarmac at JFK with all communication cut off and a bioterrorism response team en route. CDC doctor Ephraim Goodweather finds all but three passengers dead in an incident that apparently lasted only six minutes.

All of this is a reasonable prologue for what seems to be a full-scale vampire apocalypse. Like the investigators themselves, I'm left trying to figure out how things transpired on the plane, and it makes for a pretty engaging mystery.

Doctor Goodweather comes off as rather generic as main characters go. The other main character, Abraham Setrakian, seems a bit more interesting, but the present-time version of him just gets a tease in the last two pages.

This issue did a nice job of setting the scene, but other than the opening flashback, there the story felt like it was all setup and no depth. The arrival by plane was a nice variant on the events of Dracula, but the really interesting aspects that will distinguish this from other vampire stories are not yet apparent.

Rating: 6/10