American Vampire # 4 2010 pg 32 One Drop Of Blood by Rafael Albuquerque & Stephen King

American Vampire # 4 June 23, 2010
"One Drop Of Blood" pg 27
Pencils, inks and wash on DC Vertigo board
Pencils & Inks: Rafael Albuquerque
Writer: Stephen King
Writer: Scott Snyder (Signed lower left)

It's high noon for the American vampire as Pearl Jones faces off with the coven that ended her human life and Skinner Sweet gets the showdown he's been demanding for the last 20 years--with his old adversary Marshall James Book.

Will Bunting continues his strange tale of Skinner Sweet. James Book and his posse reach the Bakersfield Mines to bring the undead outlaw to justice. They find Skinner Sweet's old gang laying in wait for the victor of the showdown, but they are unaware that Bram Percy and the European vampires are watching the entire event unfold.

The series imagines vampires as a population made up of many different secret species, and charts moments of vampire evolution and inter-species conflict throughout history. The focus of the series is a new American bloodline of vampires, born in the American West in the late 19th century. The first of this new species is a notorious outlaw named Skinner Sweet, who wakes from death, after being infected, to find he has become a new kind of vampire, something stronger and faster than what came before, impervious to sunlight, with a new set of strengths and weaknesses. The series goes on to track his movements through various decades of American history—along with the movements of his first and only known progeny: Pearl Jones, a young woman working as a struggling actress in the 1920s silent film industry when she is attacked by a coven of European vampires hiding in Hollywood. Sweet saves her (uncharacteristically) by giving her his blood, thereby turning her into an American vampire like him, at which point she seeks revenge on the classic vampires who attacked her in life. The complicated and charged relationship Jones has with Sweet is another focus of the series.