In a room where Wolverine - complete with owl-like hair, claws and stubble - sips Sprite out of a plastic cocktail glass and Obi Wan Kenobi picks out free comics, it is easy to overlook Kody Chamberlain wearing a dim orange button-up shirt. A flip through his portfolio and it's hard to forget the gritty black-and-white characters clothed in shadows or the vampires painted in nightmare colors.

Fans of all ages came out to Free Comic Day on July 3 at Acadiana Book & Comic Shop to get a sample comic and see the costume contest that drew everything from a gothic fairy to a bizarre Japanimé character wearing a bright orange jumpsuit and nearly as loud yellow hair. If they stopped at Chamberlain's table - perhaps drawn in by the nacho bowl full of red lollipops he made and named Bloodsuckers - they could not only see the local artist's gripping work, but be the first in Lafayette to preorder his upcoming IDW Publishing vampire title, Bloodsucker Tales. They could also ask him about the art he did for an upcoming Digital Webbing book tagged Digital Webbing Presents: Sherman Danger. Both titles are available to pre-order in this month's Previews, the pre-order catalog of the comics industry.

Bloodsucker Tales is the fourth installment to writer Steve Niles' acclaimed vampire series that began in 2002 with 30 Days of Night. The story follows Barrow, Alaska, a town beset with a month of darkness and ravaged by a horde of vampires. Niles, previously contributing to Todd McFarlane's Hellspawn and Dark Horse's Criminal Macabre, continued the series in installments Dark Days and Return to Barrow. Like many companies trying to move copies, IDW - which calls itself the finest in independent comics and publishes comics based on television's CSI, 24 and The Shield - called 30 Days of Night the book of the year. Unlike the rest of the crowd, it has been optioned by Sam Raimi, director of Spider-Man.

Along with spot illustrations for other projects and local design work through 50 Caliber Studios, a firm he started in 1998 after graduating with a degree in advertising design from the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, Chamberlain's first entry into Previews came earlier this year with "Intrinsic Dreams," a short tale appearing in Digital Webbing Presents 13.

Chamberlain's work brings 30 Days of Night readers a departure from previous illustrator Ben Templesmith's style - best summed up as dark and abstract - as his characters are painfully realistic. The style developed from not only post-graduate figure drawing classes, but the fact that he did not read a comic until he was 18 (the Lobo Christmas special where the Easter Bunny hires Lobo to kill Santa Claus) and didn't start drawing until he had graduated high school. The Thibodaux native first attended Nicholls University but later transferred to UL, where his first work published appeared in The Vermilion. Having only started drawing a few years earlier, it would be easy to call him something of a natural, but Chamberlain laughs it off. "Oh, I wish."

"It was pretty horrible, I became kinda fanatical about it," says the artist. "I would just draw constantly in notebooks during class in college and after hours any time I could. ... I wasn't any good, but I had a lot of fun so I stuck with it."

In 1995, Chamberlain went to San Diego's Comic Con for the first time. That first year, he visited as a fan, but the next, and every year since, he returned to get published. Unfortunately, his pen wasn't at the level editors wanted, as they rejected his submissions.

"When I was doing (it) back in the day, I thought it was pretty good. When I look at it now I can see why they didn't want to publish it," he says. However, one editor, Philip Amara from Dark Horse, must have seen something in his submissions, as he began offering him tips and advice. Now, Chamberlain crafts two pages a day if his design load is light.

On customized paper he designed with inch markings for easy paneling, Chamberlain illustrates the script he received from Niles. Resembling a movie script, characters' actions are outlined and their dialogue is transcribed. Background details are vague, giving him the freedom to create what he thinks a dark alley should look like.

"I can sort of go crazy with a lot of that stuff, try and capture the mood and the emotion of what is being said in the dialogue," he says. "Some of it is not just for simplifying, but some of it's clarifying the message. If you simplify the style, the message becomes a little more clear, so it is basically just me pulling back from reality and trying to come up with something."

When Chamberlain pulls back from reality, he leaves all rulers behind. All of his work is done without a straight edge, save for those markings on his pages. Even when it comes to drawing an ice machine or metal pipes, it is all done by hand.

"One thing we can do is add a little grittiness, a little distortion to it, that makes it interesting to look at," he says. "A lot of times, when you draw with a ruler too much everything looks perfectly straight and clean. It just looks stale. A lot of it is mood. You don't want it to be a clean, nice hospital setting, you want it to be a dark, gritty alley with rats and mildew on the wall. Part of that is line quality. You can't go in there and draw every little speck of dirt, but you can make the ground crooked."

It's baffling to look at some of his work, say a scene where a vampire is chased down an alley, and think Chamberlain created not only the characters but every brick in the wall. Even someone who has ground many a pencil to a nub wouldn't be able to replicate such a thing.

"Well you have the eraser, too," laughs Chamberlain.