30 Days of Night

30 Days of Night is a graphic novel illustrated in an urban splatter-grunge style. In 2002 digital vector (graphics that are suitable for print) textures for comics were still a bit of a novelty and artists used them a lot. To my 2021 eyes they seem over-used here and make it easy to recognize the novel as an early “aughts” piece. It’s still beautifully done, though.

For those who are non-artists, illustrators purchase textures so they don’t have to create them each time “by hand.” They come in files like the ones below. They work like a font. You choose one, click—and there’s your blood. You can stretch, scale, and color your splatter gore. You can overlay different colored copies, like we see in this novel--white over gray over black. You can create motion blurs and the like.

Grunge texture splatter created by a vector graphic

Ben Templesmith uses a realistic treatment of facial surfaces such as skin, nose, and chin. Everything else is abstracted for maximum narrative clarity and emotional punch. We readily see who is a member of the undead and who is not through hastily scratched-in teeth, extended, curling tongues, and the use of red, which is one of the few colors in the book. I like this combination of photorealism and rough line drawings. The characters’ likenesses differ from panel-to-panel. Their eyes are often uneven in size, and facial shapes change depending on the needs of each moment.

In graphic novels, like in other kinds of books, narrative clarity is a must. The abstract style used in 30 Days of Night puts its clarity at risk occasionally. For example, there is a close-up of one of the zombie’s tongues in the first panel. I could not tell what it was. Later illustrations helped me figure it out. There is one panel I still can’t figure out. I know it’s a body--perhaps that is all I need to know.

One advantage to the loose style of the illustrations is that they allow the reader to focus only on what is necessary to the storytelling. We see no detailed drawings of buildings that are so common to many graphic novels. There are few clothing or vehicle details. Instead, the authors focus on faces because this is a story about people, monsters, and what they do. Oh, yeah. The splatter. There is a lot of splatter, which is also essential to the story. As I said, splatter vectors were a relatively new thing in ’02.

Graphic novels are like TV. We see, rather than read, the descriptions of setting and emotion with no more than a touch of narration. They provide a nice break from both TV and books. I liked 30 Days of Night a lot. I don’t understand who the mother and her adult son are, but perhaps more about them will come in the next book in the series. Likewise, Niles does not tell us much about who these zombies are. They just appeared. But I like that because, as readers, we get to experience the invasion the way the townspeople did--a blitz attack that comes out of nowhere.

Relic