"30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow" takes us back to eternal night in the northernmost of all places

Barrow, Alaska is a cold place, and during certain times of the year, it is also an extremely dark place.  The sun goes away for a few months, and all that's left is eternal night, complimented by bloodthirsty vampires, who are looking to feast on anyone and everyone stupid enough to stay there during the frozen darkness.  And even though it's happened before, residents of Barrow will stubbornly still stick around, believing that if it has happened before, it can't possibly happen again.  Or can it?

As Brian Kitka arrives in Barrow as the town's new sheriff, he brings along his young son, Marcus.  With the daylight waning, the cold intensifies, and strange people, dressed in dark clothing, show up  to threaten the locals.  They appear to have fangs for teeth, and funny looking eyes.  It's deja-vu all over again for writer Steve Niles and artist Ben Templesmith's series, 30 Days of Night.  Whereas the previous sequel, Dark Days, changed the setting from frozen Alaska to the sunny Los Angeles, this episode, Return to Barrow, takes us all the way back to the original episode's setting, including its storyline, which feels more or less the same.

The artwork continues to be a nuisance of incomprehensibility and murkiness.  Templesmith's technique is high on gloss and has perhaps a little too much style; what it doesn't have is characters that one can identify easily.  At the very end, when Brian's son is saved from the vampires by two mysterious figures, it's hard to tell who exactly these saviors are (although we can suspect who they might be).

Either way, the story reads quickly, as the text is minimal, giving the entire six-issue storyline a dark and confusing look, much like its predecessors.  It's instantly a blessing and a curse for this series to have Templesmith as the iconic artist with such unique style: as great as some pages may look, the other indecipherable ones are even more frustrating, for our eyes often can't make out what the writer and artist are trying to show us.  Plus, I kinda wish that they'd have taken us back somewhere other than Barrow, but hey, that's perhaps a subject for next episode's review.
C