A blood-sucking western emerges in West of Sundown

West of Sundown #1 excerpt
West of Sundown #1 excerpt (Image credit: Vault Comics)

Eastern European horror meets the Wild West aura in the upcoming creator-owned ongoing series West of Sundown from Vault Comics. Writers Tim Seeley and Aaron Campbell are working with artist Jim Terry are mashing up the Wild West and vampire genres with a story about a vampiress named Constance Der Abend who has fleed her ancestral home in Europe for late 1800s America and found the monster hunters still on her trail, so she goes to reinvent herself off the literal map in a small frontier town called Sangre De Moro.

"West of Sundown is about the great mythologies of the old world slamming into the folklore of the new world...the legends of Europe, and the birth of the American beast," Seeley tells Newsarama. "And, taking that theme as a skeleton, we've draped it with the sewed together skin of Sergio Leone Westerns and Hammer Horror films. Gritty sunsets meets foggy nights. The gothic graveyard meets Boot Hill. What horrors lie in our shared unconsciousness, and how do we stuff them all into a too-tight corset?"

The Eastern European vampiress Constance Der Abend is joined on the Wild West frontier by an ex-Confederate soldier named Dooley O'Shaughnessy, who helped her escape the monster hunters when she initially arrived in the US.

Check out this preview of West of Sundown #1:

"West of Sundown is Dracula meets La Llorona, Lovecraft meets El Cucuy, Frankenstein meets the Skinwalker somewhere in the northern frontier of New Mexico all while the west was being won," Campbell says. 

West of Sundown is colored by Triona Farrell, with colors by Crank!. Campbell has drawn the main cover to the first issue, with variants by Terry and Seeley. You can check out all the West of Sundown #1 covers here:

West of Sundown #1 goes on sale on March 23.

If you like horror, you'll love our recommended best horror comics of all time. 

Chris Arrant

Chris Arrant covered comic book news for Newsarama from 2003 to 2022 (and as editor/senior editor from 2015 to 2022) and has also written for USA Today, Life, Entertainment Weekly, Publisher's Weekly, Marvel Entertainment, TOKYOPOP, AdHouse Books, Cartoon Brew, Bleeding Cool, Comic Shop News, and CBR. He is the author of the book Modern: Masters Cliff Chiang, co-authored Art of Spider-Man Classic, and contributed to Dark Horse/Bedside Press' anthology Pros and (Comic) Cons. He has acted as a judge for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, the Harvey Awards, and the Stan Lee Awards. Chris is a member of the American Library Association's Graphic Novel & Comics Round Table. (He/him)