Book Review: My Boyfriend Bites by Dan Jolley

Title: My Boyfriend Bites (My Boyfriend is a Monster #3)
Author: Dan Jolley
Artist: Alitha E. Martinez
Publisher: Graphic Universe
Release Date: 09/1/2011
ISBN: 0761370781







When I first picked up this series via Made for Each Other (book 2 in the series), I was a little underwhelmed. I'd been told that there were better entries out there, so I picked this one up to see if that was the case & I'm happy to say that it is.

Vanessa Shingle has a knack for choosing boyfriends who need fixing—the juvenile delinquent, the school cheat, the slacker….Then she meets Jean-Paul McClellan—the perfect project!

Vanessa is determined to find out Jean-Paul's story. Why would such a smart hunk waste his life as a janitor? She drags her best friend Stork on a nighttime mission to learn more. What she sees makes her blood run cold.

Suddenly, Vanessa's little New Mexico town is overrun by vampires—obnoxious ones at that. And Vanessa seems to be their target. Is Jean-Paul one of them? If so, why is he being so nice to her? When he talks about prophecies and legacies and Romania, what's he really up to?

Vanessa finds herself with a real situation to fix—and she stakes her life on being able to rise to the challenge.

While the content was definitely inspired by various vampire hunting heroes (Buffy anyone?), this comic takes that inspiration & manages to turn it into something new & fun. You won't care that you've seen it before in a different incarnation. You'll be too busy tearing through the pages & rooting for Vanessa.

I absolutely loved that Jolley managed to give Vanessa just enough depth to keep her from being a cardboard cutout as well as avoiding the temptation to keep from giving her any flaws. (It's quite easy to fall into that when your story only has so many pages for both plot & character development.) The illustrator also deserves a hand of applause for doing such a great job on the characters- I loved the way this looked.

My only complaint is that while Vanessa & Jean Paul are developed as characters, the secondary ones sort of fell to the wayside & other aspects of the book (the bad vamps, JP's bosses) weren't as well explored as I'd like. Since that would probably require at least 20-30 more pages, I can't really fault the team for focusing more on our two lead characters.

This really felt like the setup for a series, so I can only hope that Graphic Universe will allow us another look back into Vanessa's world. This has far too much promise & potential for just one entry.

4.5/5

(ARC provided by Netgalley)