Another week, another new Vertigo title.  With a number of long-running books like Losers and Lucifer drawing to a close, the Vertigo stable is being replenished with titles like DMZ, Testament, Loveless, Exterminators and now American Virgin.

Thus far, with the possible exception of DMZ (which I haven't read, because I forgot to buy it), the new books have generated a rather similar reaction: sounds good as a concept, turns out to be a bit "ehh" when you actually read it.  And, unfortunately, American Virgin goes straight into that category too.

The central character, Adam Chamberlain, is a 21-year-old evangelical Christian campaigner of the "True Love Waits" variety.  He's apparently going to be confronted, in the course of this series, with things that writer Steven Seagle describes somewhat bafflingly as "global sexual ritual."  And one thing that's worth stressing right off the bat is that Adam is a rarity in modern fiction - a conservative, right-wing Christian who is portrayed as decent, honest, sincere and compassionate. 

This is actually very unusual, especially in comics.  While the political right have a rather paranoid attitude to alleged bias in the news, they're on much stronger ground when it comes to fiction, where the right-wing conservative is almost invariably the corrupt, hypocritical villain.  Nothing wrong with that on the level of any individual story, since writers can express whatever views they like, but overall it's hard to deny that the arts tend to have a heavy left-wing and liberal bias.  On one level, of course, I have no problem with that since I'm a liberal myself.  But most comics, like a depressingly large proportion of liberals, display an understanding of the average right-winger which is no more nuanced or accurate than Ann Coulter's grasp of liberalism.

Against that background, a character like Adam makes a pleasant change.  We're not being invited to agree with him, of course.  That would be commercial suicide for a Vertigo book.  But we're certainly invited to respect him, which is notable in its own right.  (His parents have fallen straight out of the caricature tree, mind you, but that's more forgivable when Adam is there as a contrast.)

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the book has forgotten to make Adam interesting.  He comes across as a selection of laudable character traits who suffers from a compulsion to mention God once a page.  I don't get any real sense of him as a person, so much as an abstract story concept awkwardly bundled into the form of a character.  On top of that, it's not a desperately compelling story.  I just don't feel any great interest in seeing this guy react to "global sexual ritual", or indeed anything else.

To be fair, I'm not American.  And Adam represents a brand of evangelical Christianity which is a powerful social force in America, but pretty much irrelevant here in the UK.  Perhaps to Americans Adam has some wider socio-political resonance, but for me, he's just an example of something odd that happens in a foreign country.  He doesn't really signify anything for me beyond those occasional "aren't Americans wacky" documentaries they use to fill time on Channel 4.

There's an awful lot going on in this first issue, but none of it's terribly engaging, and none of the characters really come to life.  Like so many of Vertigo's recent launches, it seems like a nice idea in theory (at least to the extent that I understand what the idea is supposed to be).  But it lies flat on the page.

Rating: C+

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