Image Comics brings you a vampire story where a world turns upside down and vampires crave other than blood in Blood Stained Teeth Book One. 
So I get to review a vampire story where they’re hungry not just blood but something else? Maybe virgin men or women, or something, but there’s a saying from this comic that goes with “immortality isn’t cheap.” As vampires are becoming rich, smugglers, and even getting attention in public for money in a modern world, I feel like I’m reading another issue of Spawn by Todd McFarlane. The story is created by Christian Ward and Patric Reynolds, Christian is a London-based illustrator, comic artist, and writer who worked on several projects from Image Comic titles such as The Infinite Vacation with Nick Spencer. He worked with several clients from other comic industries, and most of his projects also collaborated with other creators. And Patric has an intriguing story once said that he left his former life as a teacher in Las Vegas, his house, a pension, and a Toyota just to go and learn how to become a comic artist which took so many sacrifices for him and started a new road for him. Since then in 2009, he worked with several comic artists and writers on several different titles that were all published by Dark Horse.
The front cover shows a vampire who is about to bite someone with his golden fang with his mouth open. Even though the vampire already ate someone and blood had splattered all over his mouth. The composition seemed interesting enough because it almost reminded me of one of the cover arts that was drawn by Sean Philips. As much as I’d like to collect the Brubaker and Phillips comics, I’d like to see something inspired by them.
The story starts when the narration goes way too far with the details about vampires, which defines that there are two types of vampires. One who is born and one who is made. I’m guessing Alucard was born from her mother’s womb and has control of the vampires from his father’s blood, and some of the humans were turning into one. The thing about this is vampires come from different purposes, and the firstborn vampires are rich and powerful which can rule over human society. And there are some vampires which are Sips, meaning that they’re becoming very feral creatures, like the night creatures from Castlevania. And this story tells of those two types of vampires who are destined to fight against each other.
The story begins when some vampire for hire munches a girl while she’s sleeping and now became an undead Sip. The main character is a vampire for hire who wants money. Once he became a badass vampire with his vampire until he was attacked by some first-born vampires not too long ago. The next scene shows a kickboxer who looks like Sagat from the Street Fighter 2 V version, who has been eating cows as a Sip vampire. And somehow, the way he fights is very brutal. But what makes it more bizarre is when vampires started eating cows. Then they met him in person and started a fight. He plans to get him tired by beating up a vampire several times, and then after the fight, he gave the blood back to the cow. And after that, there are a bunch of scenes as if you’re watching the vampire version of Spy X Family, which soon will be shown again next month. However there are some hyped-up scenes that involve human society, like the hit-and-run vampire, the drugs, or the LSTD, but my god there are some scenes that are very fucked up. I can’t think of one decent scene where the vampires are going to war, with the First Borns against the Sips.
The story seemed legit to fill in the details on the types of these vampires, to begin with. I would think that this is actually a vampire story that took place in the modern world rather than setting the whole plot in medieval times. But who would have thought to create a story about a vigilante vampire munching other girls for blood, a Muay Thai fighter who eats cows, some crazy mother fucker who’s a junkie, and even all of that giving out immortality is a luxury for the vampires in this world. The art which Patric illustrates is mostly how he illustrates his comics in black and white, which is coming from someone who lives in Portland with his Medicaid and a bus pass. The character design is just like you’re reading Batman or one of the GTA characters from the game that you can think of because this comic is like Gotham because no other comic can be so dark whenever another edgy character comes in. The first thing that I got to witness in this comic, was his art style almost reminded me of the illustrator Sean Phillips who illustrated the stories along with Ed Brubaker for Image Comics. I don’t know where to begin, but Patric’s art style is just like that. If you’re into another vampire story where everything is so fucked up in the modern world, then this is for you.
Newsdesk