Scott Snyder has put his stamp on the Batman canon over the course of 15 years of writing for DC Comics. He co-created the multiversal threat of the Batman Who Laughs and reimagined Batman’s origin story in Absolute Batman. The Court of Owls, the nefarious secret society he co-created with Greg Capullo in 2012, proved so popular that the group appeared in the video game Gotham Knights, the TV show Harley Quinn, and there’s speculation that they could be the villain of The Batman 2. But the adaptation Snyder really wants to work on is American Vampire, the Eisner Award-winning horror series he launched in 2010 with artist Rafael Albuquerque.
“I’ve told my agent over and over I would drop everything to work on that,” Snyder told Polygon in a Zoom interview. “I love the book so much that it’s a world I want to play in in multiple media. It’s my favorite. You’re not supposed to pick favorites because it’s like children, but American Vampire will always be my favorite.”
American Vampire interweaves stories throughout American history, starting with the tale of the Wild West outlaw Skinner Sweet, who is killed by a European vampire but becomes a distinct new breed with different powers and weaknesses than the descendants of Dracula. Instead of fearing wooden stakes and sunlight, Skinner and his descendants are injured by gold. While he can’t mesmerize anyone or fly, he produces a paralytic venom delivered through his fangs and claws.
“I have an amazing partner in Raphael,” Snyder says. “We had this idea that [Skinner would] have this kind of rattlesnake quality where the jaw unhinges entirely. Everyone has a weakness that’s kind of indigenous to their area. Gold felt like greed and capitalism metaphorically, but literally the search for gold was so prevalent at that time that the idea that gold or gold dust would be the American vampire’s weakness felt good.”
Snyder said he first got the idea for American Vampire at a board game store in New York where he saw a miniature of a zombified Confederate soldier. He considered starting American Vampire with the Revolutionary War, but decided to save that period for later in the series’ run and begin with the closing of the frontier and a character raging against the fear of being fenced in and oppressed by the influence of the rich and powerful.
“Westerns are such a primary American genre,” Snyder said. “It felt like a really good place for this kind of investigation of what makes us admirable and what also makes us really despicable throughout the course of the last couple hundred years.”
When Snyder first sold American Vampire to DC Vertigo, the publisher asked if he knew anyone from the book world who could write a blurb for the series. He reached out to horror icon Stephen King, who had picked two of Snyder’s stories when working as an editor of the 2007 edition of The Best American Short Stories anthology. King wound up so engaged with the concept that he made his comic debut by writing five stories for the series’ first run.
“Unfortunately, I’d already sold it for very little money. If I had known Stephen King would write the first part of the first issue, I could have tried to get more,” Snyder says. “To see someone at his level still get that excited and that immersed in something was incredibly inspiring. He was unbelievably kind.”
Skinner Sweet spreads his vampirism to both the zealous Pinkerton agent James Book and the aspiring 1920s actress Pearl Jones. Book and Skinner are alternatively brothers and enemies, with their outlooks effectively flipping over the course of the series. Pearl, who Snyder based on his wife, remains the moral center throughout the story, representing the best impulses of America.
“Pearl [embodies] this belief that we’re in it together and that the purpose of the experiment is collective, and it’s about us trying to embrace each other and make each other better, knowing that we probably will never live up to our principles, but chasing those principles,” Snyder says.
The series moves forward and backward in time, with plotlines involving World War II, the construction of the Hoover Dam, and a greaser vampire hunter. After a five-year hiatus, Snyder and Albuquerque reunited in 2020 to finish the main arc with a story mostly set in 1976.
“I think there’s a fascination right now with the ‘70s in that it felt like a moment of dissolution and skepticism, when a lot of idealism from the ‘60s crashed and there was a feeling of solipsism,” Snyder says. “A lot of the things that we thought made us exceptional were pretty badly damaged with Nixon and Watergate and Vietnam. I think that feeling of entropy, and that this experiment might break apart, has echoes in really big ways right now.”
Going back to American Vampire let Snyder and Albuquerque escape from the pressures of life and work.
‘When you’re on a book like Batman, everybody knows the character,” Snyder says. “Everybody has opinions. A lot of people know it better than you and tell you, you got this wrong. But when you’re making your own series that’s built out of everything you love, nobody knows it better than you.”
Snyder would still like to return to American Vampire and write an arc set in the present that would follow Pearl and the vampire-hunting organization the Vassals of the Morning Star as they face a threat with roots that go back to the disappearance of the Roanoke colony.
“I love that idea that there’s this whole kind of epic war that’s gone on between the Vassals and the vampires and all of it has been unknown and that there are these unsung heroes of history,” Snyder says. “Ultimately when you look at this moment in particular, the thing that’s inspiring about it to me is people are fighting knowing that you very well might not see the outcome you want, but you’re part of a longer story and the most important thing is to do the right thing, whether anyone sees it or not.”
Working on American Vampire honed the horror sensibilities that Snyder has brought to Batman, but also his approach to the way the Dark Knight views his endless quest to improve Gotham City.
“The way I like to write [Batman] isn’t necessarily about winning,” Snyder says. “It’s about getting up every day and fighting knowing that tomorrow something worse will probably come at you. Winning isn’t the point. Fighting is the point.”
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Author: 360 Technology Group
