Yes, it’s time for another patented comic book timeline — I’ve done them for Daredevil and Starman, and American Vampire has specific dates tied to events and jumps around a bit, so it’s a prime candidate for a good old-fashioned timeline! No time for love, Dr. Jones — let’s get right into it!
As we know, American Vampire encompasses a few different series, as it was rebooted twice and there were some ancillary mini-series. I will use these abbreviations to let you know which event comes in which series!
AV = The original series, #1-34.
SC = Second Cycle, the second series, #1-11.
1976 = 1976, the third series, #1-10.
SotF = Survival of the Fittest, #1-5.
LoN = Lord of Nightmares, #1-5.
LRtH = Long Road to Hell.
AVA = Anthology #1. Please note: I do not own issue #2, so it can’t be included in this timeline. I apologize for the oversight!
Here we go! SPOILERS abound! Not quite as many as you might think, but still more than in yesterday’s post, because this is more about “what happens,” so be careful!
1588: A group of European settlers in the New World turn out to be vampires. The natives manage to slaughter them all, and the mystery of “New Carpathia” would never be known! (AVA)
1741: Something evil is growing in the colony of Virginia. That’s never good! (1976 #1)
1774: George Washington makes a pact with the oldest monsters, who want to live in America free of persecution and continue to guard against the first evil. They believe Washington betrayed that alliance. (1976 #5)
Winter 1793/1794: Mimeteh, a Shoshone woman, is sold by her husband (who bought her when she was girl) to two mysterious gentlemen who are going to explore the Louisiana Territory. They are, of course, vampires, and one night they attack her when she discovers what they’re doing. Before they can fully destroy her, two members of the Vassals of the Morning Star, a vampire-hunting organization, kill them and stake her. They don’t know that stakes don’t work on American vampires, and she wakes up, kills them, then returns to her tribe. She can’t help herself, though, and she kills everyone in her tribe, then hides herself away in a cave so she doesn’t kill anyone else. (AV #20)
December 1799: George Washington is convinced by the Gray Trader to betray his alliance with the ancient monsters. He tries to stop the beast’s growth in his soil, but he catches cold and dies. (1976 #7)
1811: A group of Indians in Arizona are attacked by strange, smoke-like vampires and the Gray Trader. (SC #1, 4)
May-July 1850: William Dodgeman (or Dodgerman; it’s written both ways in the text) and his pal, Seb, leave the Sacramento gold fields for Nevada, where they get work at the Royal Forkes mine. Unfortunately, they find out they’re basically digging a nest for Satan. Oh dear. (SC #5)
1850: Skinner Sweet is born. (AV #2)
1852: Jim Book is born. (AV #5)
1856: Gil Jones and his wife Marie move to Kansas, where they encounter vampires. Of course they do! (AVA)
Summer 1863: Skinner Sweet comes to live with Jim Book in Missouri after his parents are killed in the violence of the Civil War. Even as a boy, Skinner is a dick. (AV #19)
October 1871: Skinner and Book, in the army now, fight Apaches in New Mexico. The leader of the Apaches, Hole in the Sky, awakens Mimeteh and asks for her help. When she declines, he hacks her up and becomes a vampire himself. Mimeteh, who’s not dead, doesn’t take kindly to this and kills him and all his followers, saving the army the trouble. For some reason, Skinner is never punished for murdering his commanding officer in front of the troops. (AV #19-21)
1872: Dracula is brought to London and stored in a special facility under the Tower Bridge, which is built partly to shield the facility. (LoN #1)
1877: Jack Warhammer heads into northern Canada to check on a party of German fur traders who seem to have disappeared. When he gets there, he finds out they’re all vampires and they’ve been killing the local Cree. Before he dies, he rescues a young Cree boy who, it appears, is one of Travis Kidd’s ancestors. (AVA)
1880: Jim Book and his deputy, Felix Camillo, are escorting Skinner Sweet from Sidewinder, Colorado, to New Mexico, where he will be hanged. Skinner and Book don’t seem to know each other, which is odd as they grew up together. Skinner’s gang wrecks the train to free him, and Skinner is infected by a vampire. They think he’s dead, and they bury him and later (in 1883) dam up the river to create a lake, through which vampires cannot move. That turns out to be untrue with regard to Skinner, who is a new kind of vampire. (AV #1-2)
1886: Felix Camillo marries Benita Juarez. (AV #2)
1888: Will Bunting, the writer who was with Book and Camillo on the train and followed Book around after that, shows Book the notes for his novel, Bad Blood, which is about Skinner. (AV #2)
1888: The British royal family asks to see Dracula’s containment coffin, and later that year, Albert, the Duke of Clarence, becomes Jack the Ripper thanks to Dracula’s evil will influencing him. (LoN #2)
1890: Felix and Benita’s daughter, Abilena, is born. Book is her godfather. Benita dies during the birth. (AV #2)
1901: Hattie Hoek (later Hargrove) born in Chicago. (AV #10)
1909: In Lakeview, Colorado, the town that replaced Sidewinder, treasure hunters go down to Skinner’s burial site (wearing olde-tymey diving suits) and discover that Skinner is, unfortunately for them, doing fine and just waiting for some fool to come along and get him out. (AV #2) Skinner kills the mayor (Felix Camillo’s father), and Book, Felix, and Abilena ride to Colorado to deal with him. Skinner kills Felix and wounds Book, dripping blood into his eye. Abilena manages to collapse the mine on him. Book begins to turn into a vampire. (AV #3-4)
1912: Jim Book is almost a full-on vampire, but he’s still fighting against it. Abilena agrees to kill him before he can turn, but only if he, a 60-year-old man, has sex with her, a 22-year old woman. She wants to bear his child, so he agrees and she later gives birth to a daughter, Felicia. (AV #5) At about the same time, people employed by the vampire who made Skinner dig him up (again with the bad ideas!), and Skinner kills his maker. (AV #5)
1915: Erik Pavel gets a visit from Sir Herbert Barthes, the curator of the British Museum, who shows him a giant Egyptian statue that Pavel figures out is actually alive. Barthes is a vampire, and he hides the “statue” away. Pavel searches for years for more giant vampires, and finds them in Romania. (SotF #4)
1917: A human servant of Dracula tries to steal his body, and when Linden Hobbes intervenes, Dracula bends his will so that Hobbes kills his own wife and son. (LoN #4)
1919: Skinner visits a Wild West show in Platte River, Idaho, where he sees a bunch of his old acquaintances acting out his capture by Jim Book. He kills them all, but leaves Kitty Banks, his old lover, alive. (AV #12)
1923: Chase Hamilton, a struggling actor, allies himself with a vampire. He gets the vampire fresh blood, the vampire produces movies that will make Hamilton a star. This works out well until Hamilton meets Pearl Jones a few years later. (AVA)
1924: Skinner Sweet comes across a film crew in Death Valley and gets hired as a stand-in. He decides he likes the sound of Hollywood, so he heads there. (AVA)
July 1925: Pearl Jones and Hattie Hargrove meet Skinner Sweet in Hollywood. Pearl speaks to him a few times. She also hangs out with Henry Preston, a musician at a local joint. Pearl is invited to a party at a producers’ place by Chase Hamilton, which turns out to be a vampire feeding party. They kill her, but Skinner brings her back to life, making her an “American” vampire. She takes her revenge against the vampires who made her, but not before Hattie, who wants to be a vampire, is turned herself. She sees Skinner one more time before she and Henry leave Los Angeles behind. 
At about the same time, Will Bunting is in Los Angeles, giving a talk about Bad Blood. Skinner is, of course, in the audience. Abilena and Felicia Book spot him leaving it, but don’t make a move against him. (AV #1-5)
June 1929: Pearl and Henry get married. (AV #30)
1935: Travis Kidd is born in Las Vegas. (AV #23)
Summer 1936: Chief Cash McCogan of the Las Vegas Police Department meets FBI agents Jack Straw and Felicia Book, who help him investigate a murder at a hotel which looks like it was committed by a vampire. The girl with the victim right before he was killed is from a brothel run by Skinner Sweet. Straw and Book are members of the Vassals of the Morning Star, with whom Skinner currently has a truce, so Felicia can’t touch him. Eventually, they find the killer, but Straw is killed and Skinner infects McCogan’s unborn baby with his blood. Cash’s wife dies giving birth to his son, whom he names Gus. Skinner escapes. Meanwhile, Linden Hobbes and Abilena Book visit Pearl and Henry in Arrowhead, California, to ask her what the American vampires’ weakness is. She refuses to tell them, but Henry caves and tells Abilena later. Felicia uses gold bullets on Skinner to wound him, but he escapes to Los Angeles. Cash takes Gus and begins to look for a cure for his condition. (AV #6-9) The old-school vampires who are allied with the victims visit the hotel where the first victim was killed and slaughter Travis Kidd’s parents. 
The one-year-old remembers only a name: Skinner Sweet. He swears vengeance on him, which seems like a lot for a one-year-old to remember and do, but whatever. He also looks much older than 1, possibly 4 or 5. (AV #25)
January 1937: Henry Preston is playing gigs in small bars, when he discovers an old friend is taking people for vampires to eat. Oh dear. He and Pearl kill them all and leave town for the coast. (AV #10-11)
January-June 1937: Hattie, who was left for dead by Pearl, isn’t really, and she was taken from the morgue by other vampires, who have been experimenting on her to find out what kills American vampires. She escapes and tracks down Pearl, but Pearl and Henry have already left. (AV #10-11)
1939: Travis Kidd spends some years in a sanatorium in La Jolla, insisting his parents were killed by a vampire, which nobody believes. (How he got to La Jolla is left unanswered.) (AV #23)
1940: Skinner Sweet, still suffering from the effects of the gold bullet that Felicia Book put in him in Las Vegas in 1936, is almost shanghaied in Portland, Oregon. While the reprobates are digging through his clothes, they dislodge the bullet, which revives Skinner. And, well, he does what he does. (AVA)
March 1941: Felicia Book and Cash McCogan fly to Romania to snatch Dr. Pavel, who’s rumored to have a cure for vampirism. Things do not go well. Cash sacrifices himself so Felicia can escape, and she, in turn, takes Cash’s son, Gus, out of the Vassals’ custody and hides him away, trying to figure out a cure based on Dr. Pavel’s research. (SotF #1-5)
1943: In Honolulu, Lindon Hobbes offers Henry, who’s feeling old, a chance to fight in World War II when he tells him of a vampire nest on the island of Taipan in the Marianas (which doesn’t actually exist; Snyder just elides “Saipan” for some reason). Henry accepts. His team is expendable, except for Calvin Poole, a linguist and taxonomist. Skinner Sweet is on board the ship to the island, too, because of course he is. Henry lied to Pearl about his mission, and she finds out (Skinner spills the beans in a note to her). She gets on a plane to rescue Henry, who doesn’t know Skinner by sight. On the island, the Japanese are creating a weapon that will mass-infect a population, turning them into vampires. Pearl rescues Henry and Calvin (who gets infected), and stabs Skinner with a gold knife, leaving him on the island as it’s bombed by Americans. (AV #13-18)
1948: Linden Hobbes breaks Travis out of the sanatorium and offers him a job with the Vassals of the Morning Star, but Travis is having none of it. (AV #24)
1949: Abilena Book is “expelled” from the Vassals of the Morning Star because she tries to kill Skinner Sweet on a mission. (AV #34)
1954: Calvin Poole, who also works for the Vassals, visits Midway, Alabama, to watch his younger brother perform in a doo-wop group. There are, of course, vampires in town, but not ones Calvin expects. (AV #26-27)
1954: The Russians (with the help of vampires) steal Dracula’s sleeping body from the Vassals’ headquarters in London. They want to use Dracula, but his acolytes want to wake him up. Hobbes recruits Felicia Book, who’s living in Paris with Gus. They catch up to Dracula in the Black Sea, where Hobbes dies sinking the ship Dracula is on to the bottom. Felicia becomes head of the VMS. (LoN #1-5)
1954: Travis Kidd hunts vampires and fights Skinner Sweet in Glendale, California. Skinner is working with the Vassals, which Travis doesn’t know. (AV #22-25) At about the same time, Henry Preston is attacked by a vampire in his home in La Mesa, California, while Pearl isn’t home. (AV #25) Pearl and Poole visit the Vassals’ west coat headquarters, where Henry is being cared for by Agent Bixby. Bixby tells her that the vampire who attacked Henry is connected to a coven in Los Angeles that might be linked to one she dealt with back in 1925. She agrees to find this coven, and he gives her a partner — Skinner Sweet. The VMS has a device that is injected into a vampire and releases the substance that kills it, which keeps them docile, which is why Skinner is working with them. Of course, Pearl ends up banging Skinner, because why not? 
Henry wakes up from his coma. Pearl finds Bloch, the producer who tried to kill her back in 1925, but the real leader of the coven is Hattie. Of course, she’s working with Skinner, because she promises him she can free him from the VMS. Pearl manages to get back to the headquarters and fight Hattie, but it’s Henry who shoots her in the head, right before he drops dead. Skinner gets the device out of him and escapes. (AV #28-33)
1954: Gene Bunting, Will Bunting’s nephew and the bookkeeper/librarian of the VMS, visits Abilena Book in New Mexico and tells her he thinks the Gray Trader is in America. Abilena, who has been infected with powers that enable her to see the future, sees bad things coming. Meanwhile, she’s keeping a very emaciated and unwell Jim Book in her basement. (AV #34) Later that year, Bunting heads to Nevada to find an old mine he read about in a book (see 1850, above), and when he finds it, things do not turn out well for him at all. (SC #5)
1959: William Robert Lee (“Billy Bob”) and Jolene Gibbons are turned by an old vampire that Travis Kidd is hunting. They take Jasper Miller, an orphan with the power to sense sin, with them so he can tell them what people to feed on. Kidd catches up to them in Las Vegas and allows them to get married before they allow him to kill them, as they don’t want to live as vampires. Kidd leaves Jasper for the cops. (LRtH)
1960: The first U.S. man in space is a mummy. (SC #7)
1965: Pearl is in Kansas, providing a refuge for vampire children. One of them talks of the Gray Trader, which freaks out Calvin Poole when Pearl tells him about it. Calvin discovers that the Gray Trader has something to do with the original vampire, the most evil one of all! Skinner shows up, telling her about weird vampires that dragged him deep underground, where he saw a huge monster, and that it knows about Pearl and is coming for her. The Gray Trader and his minions show up at her house and destroy it, but she, Skinner, and the kids get away. We learn that Skinner has been bitten by the Gray Trader, but he doesn’t tell Pearl about it. (SC #1-4)
October 1965: Pearl, Skinner, and Calvin go to the VMS station in Florida, where they find Felicia Book and Agent Bixby. Book tells them about the first monster and the hero, Hurin (or, later, Huron), who founded, basically, the Vassals of the Morning Star to fight it. Hurin created a weapon to defeat the monster, but the beast managed to turn him into the Gray Trader, and he’s been protecting it for thousands of years. The weapon is in Nevada, underneath a heavily guarded VMS base. The Russians know that the beast is in the U.S., recovering its strength, and they developed their space program to keep tabs on it. If their satellites detect anything “beast-like,” they’ll launch nuclear missiles at Nevada. Pearl and Felicia go to Nevada to recover the weapon, while Skinner, Calvin, and Bixby go to Florida to intercept the Russian satellite transmission. There are many betrayals, naturally, but when it’s all said and done, Felicia and Pearl recover the weapon and Skinner is no longer a vampire. How weird! (SC #6-11)
1967: Someone tries to kill Skinner Sweet in New Mexico. He narrates that he’s been hearing things about something big coming for them all. Oh dear. (Sweet is still a vampire in this story, which either means the date is wrong or Snyder forgot he planned to take away his vampirism, as it was published before Second Cycle. Beats me!) (AVA)
December 1970: Travis Kidd and Gus are hiding out in the Florida Everglades. Gus is eventually kidnapped by the Gray Trader. (1976 #7)
May 1973: Pearl and Jim Book visit the new VMS bookkeeper, Mei Bunting, in New York, to find out more information on the beast and its minions. (1976 #7)
June-July 1976: It all comes to a head in Las Vegas, as the beast rises, and everyone fights against it. Good times! (1976 #1-6, 7-10)
It’s not quite as intricate as the other ones I’ve done, because generally, Snyder sticks to a time period for an arc or three, then jumps forward to a different year for a different arc, but he still goes back in time a lot to fill in some blanks, and that’s pretty neat. As I’ve written before, I appreciate when writers have a timeline in their stories that they stick to. It’s easier for Snyder to do this, as his epic is set completely in the past and it’s not tied into any other continuity like Daredevil and Starman are, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have to figure it out and he certainly didn’t have to do it this way. I hope you enjoyed this!
