Blood of the Virgin

Thirteen years ago, Sammy Harkham published Crickets #3, in which he debuted his serialized story, Blood of the Virgin, set in low-budget 1970s Hollywood. He finished it this year.

He celebrated that completion with the above one-page strip.

For his fans (like me), this has been a long journey, one which a reader could reasonably doubt would ever end. The story is fairly sumple—a young man named Seymour has a low-level job in the film industry, but gets promoted to director of the film, Blood of the Virgin, which is being produced by grindhouse production company. He is married and has a young child. Seymour has an interesting ethnic background—he is a Jew from Iraq, who was expelled in the early 50s and brought up in Australia. (It seems that Seymour was part of the Jewish population who stayed in Babylon after the Achaemenid empire conquered it in 539 BCE. Cyrus gave the Jews living there Persian citizenship and allowed them to move back to Israel—but many stayed, presumably including Seymour’s ancesters.) Over the course of Blood of the Virgin, we follow Seymour’s successes and failures as a film-director and as a husband. Despite the fact that it took Harkham 13 years to finish it, it is not an epic story. But Harkham seems very interested in the history of Hollywood, as shown in the self-contained Blood of the Virgin color special.

This beautiful, oversized comic is set in the early days of Hollywood. Unlike all the issues of Crickets, it was published by Fantagraphics and they shelled out for some utterly gorgeous color printing. I highly recommend it.

As for the six issues of Crickets in which Blood of the Virgin was published, Harkham self-published them all. I have them all except for issue 7, which unfortunately appears to be sold out. There is a book collection of Blood of the Virgin coming out in 2023 from Pantheon Books, so I’ll get to read the chapter that I missed.

What is interesting to me about a story that takes 13 years to draw is that an artist’s drawing style and storytelling will necesarily evolve over that time period. For example, here is the 4th page of Blood of the Virgin (2009).

The page is crowded, and the 12 panel sequence at the bottom describes how to make a delicious looking chicken dish. He does this little informative aside once more in this chapter, describing how to attach a rubber facial prosthetic to an actor’s head, but Harkham never uses this device again. By the last chapter, he has opened up the pages, allowing is panels room to breath.

Seymour is not just a low-level film professiuonal, he is a devoted fan of the horror genre. He writes reviews in fan magazines.

Here Seymour is trying to give Joy, one of his stars, a pep talk on what will be the last day of filming.

I love Harkham’s low-key but gorgeous artwork.

Harkham was the editor of an anthology called Kramers Ergot—which was the best comics antholgy since RAW in my opinion—and he produced two beautiful books before, Poor Sailor and Everything Together. Both were brilliant and both are, as far as I can determine, out of print. So I recommend preordering Blood of the Virgin. It is a beautiful, sad story set in a fascinating milieu.

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