There's Bad Blood between Jonathan Maberry and me!

I have been reading Jonathan Maberry's work for a while now.  I was wandering around Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego and one of the staff asked what I was looking for.  I told them something new and good.  They asked what I liked and made a recommendation, Patient Zero, the first of the Joe Ledger novels.  With this novel, I was taken hostage.  I read Dragon Factory.  I then read the Pine Deep Trilogy.  And then I read his comics.

Well now Jonathan Maberry has come out with Bad Blood, a five issue series dealing with vampires.  Trick, a stage 4 cancer patient, is attacked by a vampire.  It is only the chemo he has been taking that saves his life.  However, the audacity of having bad blood, blood that would poison a vampire, begins a blood feud between Trick and the unnamed vampire.  The vampire tears apart Trick's link to the world of the living, his friend, Kyle.  The only person fighting to keep Trick alive.  Trick also loses Jared, a former teammate from Trick's healthier days.  This is all part of the vampire's plotted revenge forcing Trick to watch as his world is torn apart around him, literally.

In the second issue, Trick encounters Lolly, his passport into the world of vampire clubs and even darker goth sex clubs.  Lolly is a part-time stripper who wants to become a vampire, but it willing to help Trick find Kyle and Jared's murderer.  She does not believe it would be a vampire who murdered Kyle and Jared, but her faith is shaky, due to what seems to be her experiences with evil at the hands of people in a position of trust in her life.  Trick is exposed to new experiences, but grows no wiser.  Lolly is a sucker (hey, you were expecting that one!) who will have to wise up quickly as she has her own encounter with a vampire, one of the minions of the vampire who attacked Trick.

The artwork by Tyler Cook, whose work has been seen in Dark Horse's B.P.R.D., is shadowy and largely monochromatic lending itself to the vampire-noir vibe of the story.  I expect we will travel from dark underworld to an even darker underworld within the next three issues leaving nightclubs and heading underground into sewers and lost sections of the city inhabited by vampires and the Goddess of Blood.  Bad Blood is sold at all the better comic shops, including Comic Quest, 23811 Bridger Rd. #100, Lake Forest California 92630.