From blues song anti-heroes to maestros of Sword and Sorcery, we've been hitting some of the most out there realms of the comics multiverse. I figure it's about time to bring things back to base in a big way. Maybe something with a little drama, something a bit sexy? How about vampires? Mafia vampires. In Miami. Sound good? Sounds like Bite Club.

Originally released under DC imprint Vertigo in 2004, Bite Club is Interview with the Vampire by way of The Sopranos. All sex and attitude, the premise of Bite Club is pretty simple really. Vampires aren't just real, they're pretty common. There are apparently over 300,000 in Miami alone.

The comic opens with Eduardo Del Toro—head of the vampire crime family that rules Miami—getting hosed down with wooden bullets and chucked out a window. Who killed Edwardo is a pretty big question, but even bigger is what happens next? The Del Toro family is something of a mess. You've got Eduardo's three kids: Eduardo Jr., who is trying to keep his own son out of jail; Risa, the sadistic Paris Hilton-esqe daughter; and Leto, the black sheep who left the family to become a catholic priest of all things.

You've got the cops sniffing around trying to find the killer, the family's hired goons trying to get to the guy first, and to top it all off the impending IPO of the family's legitimate business front PharmaTech, which also just so happens to manufacture the Del Toro's illegal narcotic de jure, Plasmorgia Ahh, family.

This comic just oozes sex, thanks in large part to perennially naked and humping everything in sight Risa. Which is not to say that it doesn't also have its fair share of violence. Fans of movies like Scarface and the Godfather will hardly be disappointed, to say the least. Bite Club is inventive certainly, but not particularly innovative. Fans of the gangster genre will not be disappointed.



The series was written by Howard Chaykin and David Tischman, who have each been bouncing about the comics industry for some time. The concept and plot are well executed, although the dialog isn't exactly Shakespeare. The one complaint that can be leveled at the comic is that they took enough plot for an entire season of a TV show and crammed it into a 120 page comic. With a half a dozen different plot lines the action moves quickly, and some of the side plots aren't given quite the room to develop that they should. The series could definitely have been improved by being filled out to 12 or even 24 issues.

David Hahn's illustration is simple and clean, reminiscent in many ways of Pia Guerra's work on Y: The Last Man; albeit slightly more cartoony. The real strength of the art comes from Brian Miller's colors. Each scene is drawn with a different, very limited color palette. It gives the effect of each scene being shot through a filter, and elevates the film-like feel of the series.

Bite Club is a great, fun read, and available as a trade paperback for $10, or $20 for the larger print version bundled with follow up series Bite Club: VCU.

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Tobiah Panshin was born in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, taught all he knows by the animal companions that raised him. As many fine naturalists will however note, Badgers and Woodchucks are notoriously bad at algebra. His math and science skills doomed from an early age, young Tobiah followed the only path available to him: the Humanities. Today, Liberal Arts degree in hand, he pursues with the dogged determination of a short-tailed shrew the pathetic, poverty bestrewn life of a writer. Armed with the strongest weapons he possesses--the umlaut, the gerund phrase, and the mighty schwa--he battles the English Language in a never-ending struggle for domination.