It’s a shame that there’s a severe lack of romance in comics. Not actual romance, there’s plenty of that, but not enough of the actual genre itself. Vampire Emmy and the Garbage Girl is an attempt at the genre and the unfortunate thing is that it really needs more issues to get it right. [su_quote]Synopsis: Emmy is a vampire. She falls head over heels for her garbage collector one morning when she dons her Halloween costume to take out the trash. A series of raccoon inspired moments happen before the two can go on a date, but Emmy discovers that Annabelle (Garbage Girl) has a secret of her own.[/su_quote]

The thing that’s nice about the world that Pat Shand has created is that Vampires are accepted. There’s not this whole, “oh vampires” or the even more painful “let’s explain our version of vampires.” No, instead it’s like telling a comic book reader that vampires exist and they accept that. I appreciated that. The sun rules apply, which actually made for some humorous moments. Unlike the calendar gag, which was completely unbelievable. No one writes “garbage day” on their wall calendar. No one.

That’s the thing about this story, it’s a romantic comedy. There’s humor, there’s cuteness. It’s just that it all comes a bit too easily. Even Annabelle’s big secret doesn’t hold up the story for more than a page or so. Not that their meet cute needed a ton of issues to set them up as a couple, but it definitely needed more time to flesh out these characters. Emmy is pretty generic and is just considered “weird”, but in this day and age if a woman was wearing a Cthulhu mask to take out the trash, I doubt most people would bat an eye. That’s really the biggest problem with the story though, that characters are too fresh. We don’t know them enough and their challenge of finding each other is pretty easy.

Roberta Ingranata’s art also has good and bad elements. The overall art is really good. The details are great, the line work is clean. It’s in all Black & White, which is never a problem for me, but it’s the fact that it’s clearly been left to be colored. Ingranata has numerous panels that are predominately white. It looks like an uncolored comic because of this. It’s not that it’s unreadable, it’s just that if it wasn’t going to be colored, there should have been more backgrounds added or like the few times it’s used, a pattern that fits the scene. It’s not bad, but it’s just a step away from being better.

I would like to read more of these two characters, but I have no idea what they could do together. Just reading their relationship would get pretty boring and there’s no drama in this issue to build upon so I don’t know where the story could go. It was okay. Not great and it felt like both creators were trying their hand at an under used genre, which was okay.

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Vampire Emmy and the Garbage Girl Writer: Pat Shand Artist: Roberta Ingranata Publisher: Margins Publishing Price: $7.00/$3.99 Release Date: 6/17/16 Format: One-Shot; Print/Digital

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