Writer: Sean Lewis / Penciller: Bryndon Everett / Colour Artists: Natalie Barahona, Everett / Letterer: Ed Dukeshire / Cover Artist: Tomm Coker / Logo Designer: Eben Matthews / Developed by: Keven Gardener, Sean Lewis / Editors: Brett Israel, Sanjay Dharawat / Collects: Survival #1-#5 / 12 Gauge Comics via Dark Horse
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Review by Paul Dunne
18th March 2024 (Released: 17th January 2024)
The Pitch: When Emma Reed journeyed back to her hometown in Alaska, she was expecting little more than a tense family reunion. But early that morning, a plane full of militarized vampires in a hijacked Russian warplane crash-landed in the thick woods near the mountain and changed her life forever. This thrilling tale combines the action-packed drama of Red Dawn and the horror of 30 Days of Night, as these invaders aren't just here to control the American wilderness they now occupy, but to literally suck the blood from their victims.
Comics are a visual medium, something I often spit through gritted teeth whilst reading seemingly endless amounts of text in some issues. Despite this, Survival manages to get us off to a fine start just with words and sounds. pitching us in the opening pages to blackened darkness, news of war breaking out along the Chechen border, Russian aggression, and a nuclear power plant melting down. It's with a note of bleakness I found that this feels at once realistic, new, and very familiar. Just words in the ether piped through an Alaskan radio station. Remote voices from remote places. And ideas that once seemed remote, too. We're taken into niche subcultures of the military and somewhat into the right-wing, racist elements that prop their numbers up. But there are other niche cultures here, like survivalists and...
Vampires.
And both of these have underpinnings of puritanical religion. They have a sense of right-wing paranoia about them. What if we're discovered? What if our lifestyles are the subject of hatred and ridicule? What if... we become the enemy, and are hunted?
Survival is a little different from other Vampire stories. There's no sexual element, no homoeroticism, no metaphors for penetration or drug addiction. That is to say, it's barely a vampire story at all, at least by any measure we use today. What Survival actually seems to want to discuss is territory, land, and the homestead. And homesteads need defending. Survival becomes a kind of modern Western, with the native Americans supplanted by both the survivalists and the vampires. Like native Americans, the Vampires were driven out of their home in Chechnya, and then in turn, driving the Americans from their home. For some, there might be a rich vein of irony in this, but all I felt was the inhumanity of it all. In that respect, the connection is definitive. There's an aggressiveness that one associates with the Russian mindset and by further association, the Chechnyans we're introduced to in the book. There is no mercy, no quarter... just death. The other characters are just cattle to them.
That ‘cattle’ includes the survivalist militia types that are anathema to left-of-center liberalists like me, and the Vampires, well... They're Vampires. They suck the blood out of any culture they encounter. This particular genus of Vampire is particularly cunty, choosing the militarised mindset of Eastern Bloc gangsters as their design for life. The humans really aren't much better. But the only difference is we're on their homestead. For once, it's enemy combatants that have put boots on the ground in their land, and since they're Westerners... Well, that's where our sympathies should lie, I guess. There's a dangerous romanticism in military life and hardware, here represented by Emma's ROTC pals, excited to be around her Dad, a man who knows a heck of a lot more about combat than they do. Sometimes, this can be a healthy thing, adding discipline to young lives that may need it. But also, there's a side to it that asks you to be ready to end lives or have yours ended for what are increasingly nebulous ideals. It's from vague ideas that cults, extremism, and fringe groups arise, so how far should we be willing to take it? This makes Survival more interesting because, on the surface, it doesn't give you anyone to root for. That said, Lewis and Everett take a stab at giving us a clear enemy. And Emma emerges as a lead pretty early, if only her Dad would get out of her way. She wants to move away from the paranoia of her Dad's fears about a Russian invasion. Yet even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day and he's proved somewhat correct in his fears.
Lewis writes interesting characters and gives them compelling, frightening pasts that make their presents uncertain and their futures unknowable. He gives us as many sides of the argument as possible and lets us make up our own minds about who to sympathise with. In his hands, Survival is a tightly written horror action piece, taking place on a compressed timeline that increases the sense of hopelessness and pressures the characters feel. Everett creates lively art that moves really nicely across the page. He amps up the moments of real, absurdist horror, like the talking Vampire head (wait 'till you get there) escalating the action to Simpson and Bruckheimer levels by the end. Barahona's colours add a visual flair to the art and her lighting is spot-on. Dukeshire's letters handle the shifting accents and tones fantastically and makes the sound of the voices really come through. Definitely one to pick up if you like politically dubious characters and want to see something a little different in your Vampire fiction.
Survival is available from your local comic shop now.
