Webcomic Review
Abandon: First Vampire
"Raiders Of The Lust Ark"

Sometimes it's a really big advantage to know, really know, what you like.

But it's a far bigger advantage to know what you secretly like.

Abandon: First Vampire is not as well drawn as it seems- yet it's loaded with style, very easy to get into. Anything you're really into, whether it's deep manga eyes or a pert lace-pantied girlbottom, is always rendered lovingly.

It's not exactly trying for great literary significance- again, it carries off a sort of Buffy-quipping style and never really blows it- there's some real cleverness in setting up lines like "sucks to be them" for later reference. At one point, it drops into pure text (against a background with little hearts)... and reveals the real point of the comic... which is that it is a breathless, naive teenage romance.

No joke. Abandon is note-perfect at this. If you try to read it as a serious, dark, dramatic work it stumbles terribly. If you expect the TV-darkness of a Buffy The Vampire Slayer, it's still not in focus and you trip over things like the backstory telling you about 'that great god of the heavens' Anu discovering that human love is more intense than the love of gods, who believed that only they had emotions. How shocked he was to discover the humans had feelings! How he regretted it when he loved a human woman! And we're told, "He forgot that humans are not immortal. He truly did love her. That totally irrational kind of love that only humans can have."

I'll pause for a moment while more cynical, jaded readers run off and throw up- might as well get it out of your systems now, because you're not going to like my conclusion very much, and there's more.

The main character is an ageless, immortal vampire- in fact, a unique, ageless, immortal vampire. However, she says "Oh my god! You sound like that vampire? Are you two going out?" to which the response is "Oh my god! What are you, twelve?"

Damn right she is. They are all about twelve. If twelve-year-olds got to be immortal ageless vampires with unique romantic backstories and lesbian sex, it would be just like this- and there's an important point to be made.

It's working.

This is a popular comic. Nobody minds an immortal ancient vampire being called a 'doofus'. Nobody's batting an eyelash at this vampire getting all schoolgirly over her blonde girlfriend and angsting in the vein of "oh no how can I tell her I am secretly the one romantic immortal vampire tragically kept from my one true love whom I seek across eternal time... what if I told her and she didn't like me anymore?"

Not to mention that our heroine vampire, Laila, does get to be self-aware and remembers her lost love, but the lost love (who reincarnates over and over) doesn't remember anything and doesn't know her (or his) destiny with Laila, or even that he/she is that unique and special partner in a romance reverberating beyond the end of Time.

My bet is on the blonde girl being the destined lover. She's the one who, told of the romantic story, quips 'sucks to be them'. And she's very cute, and sleeps with Laila and gets many orgasms. And her name is Kimberly.

This is a very successful comic. It's not going to be successful with me- I'm not twelve. But I have enough sense to recognize what I see, and honesty to admit what's working even if it's not at work trying to pander to me personally. I see lots of activity around this comic, I see impressive ad rates (some of which are flatly incredible- I'd love to know what's going on with that one little rectangular ad that's over four bucks. Is this a ploy, like setting that as a minimum bid and then running a house ad when it doesn't sell? The buck-seventy ad (much bigger) above it is real, Least I Could Do holds it at the moment.

I see conversation, and though there are bits of critical judgement in that conversation (such as one reader politely pointing out a drawing error on one character's arm in one panel), it's far more common to see people just plain enjoying themselves. "Heads flying everywhere. Good times."

My advice for Abandon: First Vampire is very simple.

Keep going. Keep doing what you're doing, don't get too sidetracked by anything.

The fact is, this comic is finding popular success being exactly what it is- romantic, naive, with the sophistication of a twelve-year-old and the self-seriousness to go along with it. There's a veneer of sophistication, but it's so thin that it's hardly there- the deep backstory is pure pandering to people's need to feel special, and beyond that, to feel that their romantic love is really more intense and significant than anyone else's has ever been, in all of history.

So, we get to live vicariously with Laila and Kimberly and other kids as they pursue their dreams, and the best part is, in this world it's all literally true- Laila's love really is the deepest love throughout the whole span of time, and I am sure the creators of Abandon won't screw it up. There will be many tribulations, but the path will run true.

It's amazing that with Abandon, my critical sense calls for exactly the opposite thing that I longed for from Dark Zoey. With that comic, it set up a shallow, vacuous facade of a world, and I applauded how powerful that meaninglessness became, and goaded the creator to subvert it- jump out of the comic's world and throw some curve balls at us, dislocate the underlying reality. It begged to be subverted- by significance.

Abandon: First Vampire calls for exactly the opposite. It drowns in so much significance and momentousness that it's a bit hard to grasp, and the characters grapple with this vast destiny with alarming everydayness. They come off just like the kids you go to school with, never mind that they're epic ancient vampires. Their concerns are strictly on a teenager level, and the impossibly epic, romantic backstory lives on that same level. This comic has found its audience, and it's a potentially huge audience, and the thing is to not cheat them or cop out, not to get all superior. They want some T&A, they want heads flying off, and although they may not tell you outright, they want this subtext of the epic romantic destiny of the uber-powerful vampire except she's just like them really.

Dark Zoey struggled to connect because it was so amazingly detached, because it operated on such levels of deconstruction, semi-parody (or indeed intended parody). Abandon isn't playing any such games and as such, although it takes seriously things Dark Zoey would see as a joke or ironically, it connects effortlessly with romantic teenagers of all ages.

There's a special risk that comes with this sort of thing- you're basically telling the creator, "You're really unsophisticated, you're connecting with common folk" and putting them on notice that their ideas of great depth and meaningfulness aren't really as deep as they seem. The risk is that the creators, who've been happily doing their thing and delighting their fans, will panic and make a bid for greater relevance, which is destined to fail, because if they had the capacity for more sophisticated work they'd be doing it. Remember that audience tends to drop as you go more sophisticated and art-house: there's a reason the tagline for this review is "Raiders of the Lust Ark". It's partly because of the lesbian sex and constant attention on dating, but it's also because Raiders was a huge pop hit of a movie, in exactly the way Abandon succeeds. It's not talking down to its audience, or constructed towards a mass audience, it's just wallowing in a sort of entertainment because it loves that stuff as much as the audience does.

Hang on to that love- it will reward you.