Vampire Loves by Joann Sfar

For those who're wondering -- I got a comment on a ComicMix review after I hit two Sfar books in two days -- Sfar is pretty prolific, but US publishers have been catching up with his backlog over the past few years, and I've been catching up myself on the Sfar books published in English over the past few years.

So, in this case, Vampire Loves was published in France as four separate albums between 2001 and 2003, and translated by Alexis Siegel for a 2006 US publication by First Second.

I'm coming to realize that many of Sfar's books take place in a loose shared world -- this connects with The Professor's Daughter (as well as with several other graphic novels through the same characters) as well as Little Vampire. (The main character of Vampire Loves, Ferdinand, has a very close connection to Little Vampire, but I'll let other readers discover that from the book rather than from me.)

Ferdinand is a vampire of indeterminate age, living in Vilnius in an old castle and obsessing about problems with his love-life. (If his friends were a bit more caricatured and popped in on him more, this could be Vampire Seinfeld.) The four stories here are all pretty talky, with characters wandering around to chat with each other -- sometimes angrily, but usually as friends. As usual with Sfar's work, it's entertaining but a bit more leisurely and meandering than one would expect -- he's telling a story about characters, so he lets them wander around on their own to see what they'll do.

This is lighter and perhaps sillier than a book like The Rabbi's Cat 2, but it's probably a better introduction to Sfar for that reason.