Vertigo Pop: Bangkok is the last of the three Vertigo Pop miniseries, the other two being Tokyo and London.  To be honest, they didn't sell all that well, so the chances of the brandname being brought back must be fairly slender.  Aside from vague notions of foreign cities and pop culture, it was never entirely clear what they were supposed to have in common in the first place.  On the bright side, they were both good books.

Bangkok brings back writer Jonathan Vankin, who was responsible for Tokyo.  And as with Tokyo, this book is as much about Americans interacting with Asian culture as about the culture itself.

This time round the Americans are a rather less sympathetic bunch.  Marshall is an irritatingly pretentious actor who's come to Bangkok partly because his girlfriend Tuesday bullied him into it.  Tuesday is our lead character and the closest we get to sympathetic, although it's not like she gets all that close.  As a westerner who seems unfathomably convinced that her presence constitutes the sole exception to westerners being a bad thing, not to mention a character whose main objective is to annoy her boyfriend, she comes across as a bit of a vengeful hypocrite.  And then there's Benny - not so much a sex tourist as an expatriate.

Of course, Tuesday's right that the treatment of women in Bangkok's nightlife, and its use as a tourist destination for westerners, is all decidedly suspect.  Which is why the real sympathetic characters here are the unwilling teenage prostitutes; but for the most part their stories are kept marginalised as we stick with the Americans' point of view.  That makes sense, since part of the point is that the tourists choose a degree of wilful blindness about the whole place.

It's a darker affair than Tokyo was, and Tuesday perhaps isn't as likeable a character as Vankin intended her to be, which is a problem.  Penciller Giuseppe Camuncoli is strong on the characters, but never quite seems to convey a sense of place in the street scenes.  His interiors are better, though, and the club scene near the end is nicely played.

Okay, but not as immediately engaging as Tokyo.  I'll give it time.

Rating: B+

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