I experienced a mounting sense of unease as I read Life Sucks (First Second), and it was only partly due to the increasing menace of the book’s events. Things do get tense as it goes along, but my discomfort stemmed from the fact that an amiable comic was becoming, if not precisely the kind of story it mocked, something I found equally deserving of disdain.

I should admit that I’m a hard sell for vampire stories to begin with, for many of the reasons creators Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria and Warren Pleece cite in the early going. I find the gloomy, self-pitying romanticism of many of them off-putting and outright dull, so anything that promises to take the wind out of those particular sails is generally welcome. (Joann Sfar’s Vampire Loves, also from First Second, is a winning example.)

Life Sucks starts well. Dave has been turned into a vampire because his sire needed someone to work the night shift at his convenience store, sticking Dave with a lifestyle he never chose and its depressing mechanics of servitude. He’s nauseated by blood, so he subsists on plasma, which leaves him without any of the physiological benefits vampirism can offer to the aggressive. He wasn’t exactly on the fast track before he was made, but now he faces a long, lonely lifetime of changing the dates on the milk and restocking the beef jerky display.

I’m fairly sure I could have read an entire graphic novel about Dave carping about his circumstances, hanging out with his friends, and getting badgered by his boss, Radu. (Radu has traded in capes and castles for track suits and entrepreneurship, abandoning Transylvania for California.) Dave is mopey, but at least he has reason to complain, and his friends are endearing.

Unfortunately, Abel and company decided at some point that a plot was necessary. And here’s where I encounter a problem with evaluating the book objectively, because it hinges on two devices that I always find particularly objectionable. One is when two characters place a bet on which of them can win the heart of a third. Once that element comes into play and a person is treated like a trophy, you’ve generally lost me, no matter how deservedly miserable the outcome is for the wagerers.

The second element that chafes is when a character lies or withholds information that could protect another character, especially if that kind of dishonesty serves no meaningful purpose. Mileage on whether the dishonesty in Life Sucks was necessary or at least in balance with the alternative will obviously vary, but it struck me as a choice made because there would have been no more story if it hadn’t been.

So I can’t say for sure if the presence of two driving bits of narrative that I can’t stand under just about any circumstances makes Life Sucks bad, or just bad for me. I do think the conclusion is bizarrely staged, with significant events described after the fact instead of actually rendered for readers (not that I yearned for it to be longer). And I do think Rosa, Dave’s inamorata, starts promisingly but ends up behaving in ways that drive plot instead of making sense. And I do think “I can barely stand to look at you” is an appallingly bad line of dialogue anywhere outside of a Barbara Stanwyck movie.

But overall, I just don’t know. Part of me feels that this book simply, empirically doesn’t work, but another part wonders if my personal biases are overtaking my judgment.

(This quasi-review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

You can’t say you weren’t warned. Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows (First Second) opens with a beautifully sad poem by Deborah Garrison, and the creator’s biography announces that the book was “born out of the agony of watching his close friends’ child die very young.” It’s a bit of an over-preparation, as Pedrosa frames that tragedy as a parable and illustrates it in a friendly, fanciful style.

He also avoids some pitfalls common to both the material and his approach to it. The central message of this kind of story – that the death of a child is hard to accept – is so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be argued. How, then, do you move your audience beyond simply prodding their shared anxieties and commonly held values? And when you dress that tragedy as a fable, how do you avoid flattening the experience even further?

Pedrosa manages by giving specificity to the family’s dynamic. They aren’t just Father, Mother, and Child. Louis, Lise and Joachim have routines and private jokes, and Pedrosa gives their life on a farm in the countryside easy, believable warmth. I liked them individually and as a unit before I was drawn into their misfortunes. That makes a difference, though the effect is more fleeting than it should be.

Anyway, the plot: one day, Joachim sees three shadowy riders on the hill near their house. They fill him with anxiety that transfers to his parents as the shadows appear again and again. Louis goes into defense mode, and Lise tries to find out why the shadows have come. When she learns the answer, the parents experience a philosophical divide. Lise would like to cherish whatever time Joachim has left, but Louis panics and tries to take his son into hiding.

That argument – mournful acceptance versus a likely futile fight against the inevitable – could have made for a fascinating comic all on its own. I’m not sure that the book benefits from Pedrosa’s choice to focus on the father’s resistance. It marginalizes Lise, and it’s impossible to not resent Louis for robbing her of the scant time she has left with her son. Pedrosa is clearly conscious of that result, but I’m never fully persuaded that Louis did what he had to do or that the sequences that follow are sufficient compensation for Lise’s absence from the narrative.

When the book takes that turn, Louis’s struggle becomes a sort of ambient backdrop for treachery and disaster that never fully connect with the more compelling themes that Pedrosa established earlier. These sequences are beautifully drawn, and they have emotional punch, but they didn’t cohere into a whole story for me. Pedrosa is a marvelously skilled illustrator and a potent storyteller moment to moment; no chapter of Three Shadows is anything close to a waste of time, but the last half of the book never becomes the transforming quest that seemed to have been intended. It just confirms that Lise was right all along, but it never rewards her for that.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)