Who Would Win In A Fight – Robots or Vampires?

That’s the question that Transfusion asks. Created by 30 Days of Night co-creator Steven Niles, Transfusion introduces us to a very bleak future. There are no longer seasons. The days are scorching and the nights freezing. War brought humanity to its knees and, well, that’s not all.

See, humanity is barely managing to survive in a world where emotionless, blood sucking robotic machines have turned on their creators and are stalking the globe picking off anything that bleeds. You would think that would be bad enough. Except there also happen to be vampires who are doing pretty much the same thing.

It’s almost funny in a way. The vampires find themselves very much in the same position as the humans. They are also on the verge of extinction because they are dependent on humans to live. But they also carry some amount of blood within them and the robots? They don’t discriminate at all on who they suck dry. They will take from anyone and anything they can.

And so this is the world we have been given to explore by Niles and artist Menton3.

It’s a world with shaky morals and no real ‘normal.’ We are generally predisposed to empathize with humans because, you know, we are humans. (Well, most of us.) So we feel like we ought to feel for them more so than others. But Transfusion follows a very morally ambiguous man named William who isn’t just trying to survive on his own. He’s not trying to other humans survive either. He is in league with the vampires and he lives a precarious life there as he tries to provide for them – his ‘family’ – while knowing that there are vampires out there that would tear him apart.

I don’t want to give too much away because Transfusion is a pretty decent comic that fans of 30 Days of Night are going to want to check out.

Now, personally, vampires have never been my thing. Robot uprisings, sure. I’m a pretty big sci-fi fan and I grew up watching Terminator and the original Battlestar Galactica among other things. But vampires can be done so very differently that you never quite know what you’re going to get. I actually really liked the vampires in Transfusion, though. We’re used to vampires being bad asses or sparkly teenagers. We don’t often think of them as prey or desperate in their attempts to survive. There is no mistaking what they are – they are predators who trap human prey and tear them apart. But they are also weak and vulnerable in this world where things have changed so drastically.

Menton3’s style really brings the story to life. Drawn in a very diluted, dark way, this comic really lets you feel just how bleak the world has become and how futile survival really is when roving packs of robots or vampires could drain you of everything at any moment. It looks great and the contrast of the red on the mostly grays and blacks emphasizes just how important blood is in this post-apocalyptic landscape.

The individual issues have been out for a while but the trade paperback hits April 30th. Fans of 30 Days of Night and/or Robopocalypse should keep an eye out at their local bookstores.