Author: Ana Lily Amirpour
Art: Michael DeWeese
Release date: 2021
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: Strange things are afoot in Bad City. The Iranian ghost town, home to prostitutes, junkies, pimps and other sordid souls, is a bastion of depravity and hopelessness where a lonely vampire, The Girl, stalks the town's most unsavory inhabitants. Collects the first two standalone stories.
The review: The collection of the first two issues of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the comic based on the film of the same name and written by writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour has been a long time coming. I pre-ordered the volume in April 21 and, after several shifts to the right, it finally arrived Jan 22.
It needs to be noted that this is a slim volume – some 64 pages – and the artwork, whilst starkly lovely, is black and white (actually white on black). I do need to mention that one pair of pages became more a white on grey and I wondered if this was deliberate, an obfuscation as it was tied to seeing the sun… until another few pages later in the volume had the same fading of the necessary black and at that point it seems to be a printing glitch (which hopefully has only affected a minimal number of copies). The comic was still readable but, if I’m correct about it being a glitch, is annoying nonetheless.
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As the blurb suggests there are two stories. The first, Death is the Answer, introduces us to the girl and will be familiar to those who have seen the film treading familiar streets of Bad City with familiar characters. There is no story, as such, but establishes the character and her draw to wrongdoers. The second, Who Am I, goes back in time and sees the girl walking into the desert to face the sun but after 15 years, days spent buried away from the sun, subsisting on a meagre diet of desert dwelling fare (and a flashback to a kill in Paris), the hungry vampire heads towards Bad City – essentially providing a past for the girl.
As you can tell the volume is low on actual story, which in comic issues may be alright, building towards a story in further issues but in (what amounts to) a trade paperback is somewhat lacking. The thing is, whilst there needs to be character establishment for readers unfamiliar with the film, the lack of story is going to be a barrier – that said if you are familiar with the film I think you’ll get a kick out of seeing the girl immortalised in another medium. I am, of course, of the second camp and it was nice to see the girl again and this has bolstered my score. The art itself, as I mentioned is rather stark but it fits the character and the franchise, and was rather lovely. 6 out of 10.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
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