Sad to say but today is the final day of Comic-Con 2010. For all of you Digital Comic readers, as promised we have a special memento to offer from this year’s convention. The kind folks at HBO and IDW passed out a voucher code to attendees giving them a small bite out of the new True Blood digital comic which released on the Digital Comics Store this past Wednesday.
Here’s the voucher code for the True Blood teaser: EKJ6-TQBN-4T9Q.
To get a better taste of what to expect, check out the blog entry below from the co-writer of the True Blood series, Mariah Huehner.
Vampires seem to be one of the few mythological creatures we just can’t seem to get enough of. They’ve become the embodiments of many of the darker impulses in the human condition and our need to express/explore them. They can be metaphors for the lonely “outsider.” They can represent the scarily tempting, deeply disturbing, and often repressive side of human sexuality. They can be impossibly beautiful or hideously monstrous. Whether they’re soulless atrocities or tragically misunderstood, they’ve managed to capture our collective imagination like very few other horror creatures, and they’re portrayed in a more nuanced way than most of our nightmares ever are.
True Blood is no exception. But it isn’t quite like Ye Olde Vampyre Tales, either. While many of the metaphoric elements are still intact, they don’t really mess around with being coy. It’s a very raw look at vampires, and in many ways a very raw look at humanity and life itself. It’s more passionate, more violent. More everything. And it’s not afraid to dip into the larger pool of myth, either, with shape shifters and werewolves and Greek goddesses…and who knows what else still to come.
Working on the comic with Alan Ball, Kate Barnow, Elizabeth Finch, David Tischman, and David Messina, has been one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. Not to mention my first official writing gig in comics. It’s very exciting and scary and most of all: fun. There are very few “worlds” as creatively open to play in as True Blood, and the team really let us explore the characters in ways I hope fans will enjoy. There’s still plenty of sex, violence, and gore…But, just like the show, there’s a lot more going on. There’s a mystery to be solved, a creepy new monster to deal with (where we dipped a bit into local Louisiana mythology ourselves), and all the characters are forced to reveal secrets from their pasts they’ve never shared with anyone before. Things most of us would be happy to go to our graves never telling even our nearest and dearest.
Personally, vampires have never really “scared” me in that booga-booga sense. But they do horrify. I mean, drinking blood seems incredibly gross to me, for one thing. Not to mention the fact that you have to kill another person to keep “living” your undead life. Lack of daylight I’m mostly okay with, though I’d miss sunsets over the ocean fiercely. But it’s losing everyone you love to age and death, while you stay the same, that’s truly horrifying. Because I kind of like the idea of immortality sometimes. Doesn’t everyone? You know, when it’s late at night and no one else is around and you realize that you’re going to cease being at some point and there are so many things you’re going to miss. That’s when the idea of never growing any older, of never dying, is most tempting. And maybe that tradeoff is worth a little blood sucking, right?
Maybe that’s what’s so intriguing about Bon Temps and the characters that inhabit True Blood. The sense that, deep down, a lot of them are thinking the same thing.
I hope you like our little True Blood story. I hope you find it as fun, romantic, scary, funny, sexy, and raw as the show. And if it makes you wonder, even a little, if you might make a good vampire, well…I won’t judge.
