Killadelphia vol. 2: Burn, Baby, Burn

For a series whose premise is, “What if Former President John Adams was a vampire, and tried to stage a vampire takeover in modern-day Philadelphia?” the first volume of “Killadelphia” played it remarkably straight.  I wouldn’t say that led to a wholly disappointing vol. 1, but I was curious enough to see if writer Rodney Barnes and artist Jason Alexander could prove that this setup had some long-term viability to it.  Which is why I picked up vol. 2 to see if the plans of John’s wife Abigail were any more interesting than her husband’s.  Where the first volume saw the vampire mob attack the city en masse, Abigail’s plan involves the brutal murder of select city officials to stoke terror and unrest.  While her plan proves effective at first, there are two things she didn’t count on:  That the vampires she’s working with aren’t all onboard with her plan.

Treachery is afoot here, and while I’m glad to see the bad guys struggle with their plans, it can’t quite elevate the story being told.  There’s a lot of jumping around between what Det. Jimmy Sangster and his friends are doing to fight this, Abigail’s scheming, and the backstories of some of the key vampires in this volume.  Some of this is good, like the histories of Jupiter and Toppy, while a lot of the modern day stuff kind of falls flat.  Barnes shows flashes of cleverness in his writing, such as how he takes the long way around to re-establish the best relationship in the series, but a lot of his dialogue and plotting top out at “pedestrian” in quality.  Artist Jason Alexander does get plenty of scenes to flex his skill with creating horrific imagery and it’s fair to say that he’s better at selling what’s going on than the writer is.

By the end of volume two, very little progress has been made in the overall story.  In fact, it ends with the return of a major character in a way that suggests no progress has been made at all.  This leaves me feeling that “Killadelphia” would’ve been better off embracing the ridiculous nature of its premise.  If it had, then the promise of seeing Vampire Thomas Jefferson in the next volume would’ve excited me.  Now it just leaves me feeling that if I stop reading the series now, I’m not going to miss anything worthwhile.