The thermometer was flirting with the 110s in June 2021 when the plumbing went out at Tom Walbank‘s Tucson home.
Rather than check into a hotel while workmen tore up his house, the longtime Tucson bluesman, his wife and teen daughter escaped to Mount Lemmon.
“If we were going to be stuck somewhere, it might as well be pretty,” he said, his native English accent, worn thin nearly 25 years after moving to Tucson, sneaking in now and again.
The family got a cute Airbnb and settled into mountain life for four days. On their first night, a massive storm whipped up something fierce. The lights flickered then everything went dark.
Walbank lit candles.
“I went out on the balcony and the wind was just whistling through the valley and I could see candles come on in various houses,” he recalled. “I looked down a pine tree by the balcony and I was imagining something crawling up there.”
What games the imagination can play in a perfect storm of wind and dark.
That thought that something — or someone — could slither up a pine tree swaying on a balcony rail got Walbank to thinking about ghost stories.
Actually, vampire stories.
“I should write a vampire story set in Summerhaven,” he thought to himself, and before he could talk himself out of it, the idea snowballed.
On Thursday, April 18, Walbank will host the official release and book signing for “Summerbides, AZ,” his self-published graphic novel that was born on the balcony that June day three years ago.
Walbank spent the pandemic era, when music gigs initially were few and far between, working on the project. He started out writing a novel but his wife, Leia Maahs, suggested he revisit his youthful love of illustrating and turn it into a 60-page graphic novel.
Once upon his lifetime ago, Walbank’s day job was working for an underground comic book publisher during a 10-year stay in Edinburgh, Scotland. Music occupied his nights, but he spent his days drawing cartoons and comic books.
When he and his wife moved to Tucson from San Francisco in 2000, he put his illustrating aside and focused solely on a full-time music career, getting near-nightly work at a handful of Tucson clubs and bars. A dozen years later, he dusted off his pens and pad and and created the 240-page coffee-table book “Picture the Blues,” with illustrations of bluesmen whose stories sometimes got lost in history, including Edward James “Son” House Jr., early 20th century left-handed blues guitarist Kokomo Arnold, Washboard Sam, Mississippi John Hurt, The King of Beale Street Frank Stokes and Howlin’ Wolf among them.
But “Summerbides, AZ” is his first full-fledged novel.
The story centers on a clan of vampires who stow away on a Spanish conquistadors ship bound for the Americas in the 15th century. Apparently the vampires’ bloodletting was getting too much attention at home so they figured they would set up in the new world.
Tucson blue musician, Tom Walbank is having a book release and signing for his graphic novel “Summerbides AZ.”
When Estebanico, based on the real-life Black Moroccan slave who scouted the Southwest for the Spanish conquistadors, realizes that the vampires have tagged along on the journey, he gets word back to Father Kino — yes, that Father Kino — who trained vampire hunters in Spain. The hunters were victims of the vampires who gained all the creatures’ superpowers — superhuman strength, night vision and endless life — but not their thirst for blood.
Kino sends an army of hunters to the new world to track down the vampires and exile them to Mount Lemmon. The hunters, meanwhile, create barracks in the long abandoned tunnels beneath the sidewalk that once ran under the original downtown area including Hotel Congress. Walbank discovered the true story of the tunnels — built in the 1800s and reportedly used by Chinese workers who, due to prevailing anti-Chinese laws, weren’t allowed to walk on city streets — when he was researching the real life characters he fictionalized in his story.
Father Kino’s vampire hunters, financed by the Catholic church in Walbank’s imaginings, keep up with the times, learning technology of the day to keep tabs on their unholy exiles.
Until that one day when something goes wrong and the vampires start killing again.
Walbank’s book flirts with supernatural elements, gruesome murders and giant winged rattlesnakes.
And because it’s set on Mount Lemmon, there’s also a fudge shop.
“Summerbides, AZ” is the first of three graphic horror novels Walbank has planned. The second will involve werewolves and take place in Dartmoor, a national park near his native Devon, England. The third novel will involve the werewolves and the vampires.
“Summerbides AZ” centers on a clan of vampires who stow away on a Spanish conquistadors ship bound for the Americas in the 15th century.
Walbank said his foray into novelist started as a pandemic pivot “because nobody knew when we were going to be let back in.”
“But as I started the graphic novel, I was thinking, ‘Wow, this has got some legs. This could be something I could pivot to,’” he said. “It worked out.”
But Walbank said he could never imagine leaving music entirely.
“I’m what they call a lifer. I’m a blues musician so from the get go I realized the end possibly was not in a solid gold castle wiping myself down with dollar bills,” Walbank said with a laugh. “I’m in it for the music; this is what I do. This will take my whole life.”
Walbank printed 32 copies of “Summerbides, AZ,” which he will have available for sale at Thursday’s signing along with copies of “Picture the Blues.” He also will perform a concert with drummer Dimitri Manos. It all begins at 6 p.m. at Wooden Tooth Records, 108 E. Congress St., and admission is free.
Halfway along the Mount Lemmon Highway on the way to Summerhaven, you'll find Windy Point Vista, where you can see some amazing and beautiful scenery. Video by Johanna Eubank, Arizona Daily Star.
