Life Sucks
Dave is a vampire. Instead of being incredibly beautiful and rich like the vampires of fiction, though, he's just a fairly normal guy who works the night shift at a convenience store named "The Last Stop," serving his Romanian immigrant master and trying to win the heart of Rosa, a woman who likes the idea of vampires but doesn't realize they exist. When Wes, another vampire, shows up and tries to steal Rosa away, Dave's life gets rough.
This graphic novel is a deconstruction of most common vampire cliches and tropes. It's well written and illustrated and Needs More Love. Life Sucks is written by Jessica Abel and Gabe Soria and illustrated by Warren Pleece.
Tropes used in Life Sucks include:
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Rosa gets Wes to turn her into a vampire, but then she has to follow all of his commands. After Dave gets Radu to make Wes free her, she has to get a night job and get all of her dreams about what life as a vampire would be like crushed.
- Bi the Way: Rosa's first onscreen boyfriend, Alistair; they break up after Rosa finds out when Alistair gets a huge and obvious crush on Wes.
- Deconstruction: A big one for most cliches associated with vampires.
- Funny Foreigner: Radu and his 'traditional' vampire buddies.
- Incredibly Lame Pun: The title.
- Jerkass: Wes starts out as this and keeps on going until he hits Complete Monster territory
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Radu is a fairly nice guy, for a greedy capitalistic vampire who has casually killed at least one human employee of his because he was hungry
- The Masquerade: Most people don't know vampires exist, though no one makes a big deal about the normal people who do know, like Dave's roommate Carl.
- Monster Roommate: Dave, to Carl.
- Muggle Best Friend: Carl, to Dave.
- Off with His Head: Graphically depicted when Wes decides one of his girlfriends isn't obedient enough. It's later stated that all his girlfriends except Rosa eventually meet this fate.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires here can survive solely on blood plasma but are very weak that way; they gain powers when they're pretty strong, like hypnotism and teleportation. They also live the same way humans do, mostly; they make beer out of blood and they work normal jobs, they just have to do it at night because they burn up in daylight. They can apparently also starve to death, and the vampires they make have to obey them completely.
- Vampires Are Rich: Brought up, then mocked as unrealistic.
- Vampires Are Sex Gods: Only if they cloud the minds of humans. The protagonist describes it as glorified date rape.
- Vampire Vannabe: Alistair and later, Rosa.
- Vegetarian Vampire: Dave only drinks plasma, not full blood; he's incredibly weak in comparison to the other vampires present.
- What Measure is a Human: the viewpoint of most vampires. If you gotta eat, you gotta eat. Jerome claims to try to eat only bad people, but there's no proof this is actually the case.
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