Co-creators Matt Wagner and Kelley Jones, along with colorist José Villarrubia and letterer Rob Leigh, return for the third installment in their four-part series of Kickstarter-funded graphic novels
The series reimagines Bram Stoker‘s 1897 epistolary novel of gothic horror, Dracula, which created one of the most famous literary characters of all time. Like the previously released installments of their horror series, Dracula: Book III—The Count takes place in the shadows of the original novel and tells the familiar and horrifying tale from the vampire’s own point of view.
The book has already exceeded its crowdfunding goal of $666, having garnered the support of over 1,675 backers at the time of this article’s writing and raising $166,297. If you want to get in on the blood-sucking action, you can back the project via its Kickstarter page.
The Beat chatted with Wagner via email to discuss Dracula’s evolution as a pop culture icon over the decades, the research involved in telling the story from Vlad the Impaler’s perspective, and the unique Kickstarter rewards offered for Dracula: Book III—The Count‘s crowdfunding campaign, including a chance to purchase an original piece of Jones’s art (though, those are selling out fast).
This interview has been slightly edited for clarity.
OLLIE KAPLAN: As you have mentioned in your introductions, Dracula has long been the “ultimate prototype of the supernatural predator in most people’s minds.” Because your graphic novels take place within the margins of the novel itself, how did you use the various Dracula mythologies (which are sometimes competing interpretations of the novel) to flesh out the story of the man himself? And were there any scholarly works about the character’s history that informed your creative process?
MATT WAGNER: I’ve done a ton of research for this project and, by this point, have amassed a pretty hefty library of Dracula volumes. Some of the most valuable sources in my process included; several different annotated versions of the original novel including the first such examination by Professor Leonard Wolfe (who also wrote In Search of Dracula) and the New Annotated Dracula by Leslie S. Klinger, a facsimile edition of Bram Stoker’s original notes and outlines (all of which are intact and housed at the Richenbach Museum in Philadelphia), many works by the late David J. Skal including his seminal horror history The Monster Show as well an extensive Stoker biography and Hollywood Gothic, his history of Dracula from book to stage to screen, and also several volumes by Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller, including Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, a collection of scholarly essays presented at the Dracula Centennial Celebration in 1997.
As you can see from that list, Dracula is one of the most examined, analyzed and annotated books in the English language. Since it’s an epistolary novel, which means it has no omniscient narrator and presents its story through the form of personal letters, private journals, and such, the events in Dracula are extremely specific since they’re all noted by day and month. As a result, I used an annotated calendar that delineated not only every significant action from the book but also the sunrise and sunset times as well as the phases of the moon.
There’s some debate among Dracula scholars as to what year the events of the novel take place. The book was first published in 1897 (and has never been out of print ever since), and the final segment of the book claims that it has been seven years since Stoker’s heroes confronted Dracula, so that would seemingly put the date as 1890. But there’s no indicator as to how long those various journal entries had been written prior to publication. For various reasons, I sided with Klinger in the theory that the events of the novel take place during 1888.
So far as my depiction of Dracula, his personality, voice and demeanor goes…I created Grendel over forty years ago and have written thousands of pages about unrepentant villains, so I feel like I’d got a fair understanding of how this man/monster would operate. The important factor was digging into the aspects of Dracula’s character that are only hinted at in the book and using those for inspiration. For instance, in the novel, Prof. Van Helsing twice mentions that when he was alive, Dracula attended something called The Scholomance, which is a real Eastern European legend about a seminary for the dark arts that resides high in the Carpathian mountains and is hosted by Satan himself. So, in addition to being the OG vampire, Dracula was also a trained necromancer. I couldn’t believe no one had ever done anything with that detail before…what an incredibly rich vein from which to mine a story! Which is exactly what I did in BOOK I—THE IMPALER.
Similarly, his brief but peculiar interactions with the three vampire women in the early sections of the novel led to the entirety of our story in BOOK II—THE BRIDES, as we fleshed out real stories and backgrounds for these three very different women. It’s really a matter of taking what small details are there in the novel and then expanding that into a complete and separate narrative…all while staying true to the book’s original canon of information.
KAPLAN: Dracula has been portrayed in countless films, comics, and novels. In the introduction to the first volume, the question is posed, “Does the world need another Dracula incarnation?” Sadly, since that question was first posed to the horror comics audience, the world has changed A LOT. Today, why does the world still need another Dracula incarnation—and why do we need a story from the perspective of the despot himself?
WAGNER: Well, I’ve gotta confess that I never consider my audience with anything I create. I write and draw to please myself first and foremost, and I absolutely believe that if I do that with true conviction and honest intent, that passionate principle will carry through and communicate to my readers. So both Kelley Jones and I came to this project because we love the character and pop culture zeitgeist of Dracula. And, most importantly, we felt unsatisfied with all of the vast array of other portrayals of Dracula.
Like I said, we’re both huge fans, so we do love the many incarnations of Dracula in both literature, comics and film…I even attended a Dracula ballet early in our creative process. But we also felt like we wanted and needed to do our version of Dracula. I’d been brewing on these ideas for over a decade, searching for a unique take on this well-trodden material, and, once I’d figured out my approach, I knew I had to team up with Kelley to see it through to fruition.
As I mentioned earlier, the novel is epistolary, and the only voice missing from the book’s many accounts of these events…is Dracula himself. And that works for the time period, it crafts an intimacy among the heroes and casts the villain as a sinister outside presence. The novel is extremely Victorian in its approach and its attitudes towards morality, sex, gender roles and a nationalistic fear of “otherness” and invasion from abroad. That certainly sounds familiar in the modern world, too, doesn’t it? As you said, things are changing, and it seems we suddenly find ourselves living in an age of vampires—megalomaniacal aristocrats (in keeping with our modernity, moguls instead of monarchs) with seemingly little moral compass other than an overwhelming lust to achieve more and more power at all costs. Some of them even seem to have a hypnotic power over the masses, a sinister glamour that suckers millions of people into ignoring the moral rot and obvious corruption on full display.
We as a society have long had a fascination with such monsters, characters we find repulsive but for whom we find ourselves rooting in spite of ourselves. The examples of Hannibal Lecter, and Tony Soprano, and, yes, Grendel spring to mind. So, after 120-plus years and considering the societal reality we find ourselves in, I found it appropriate to present Dracula from his own demented and unapologetic point of view.
KAPLAN: I want to talk turkey on Satan. How did you approach Lucifer’s character design?
WAGNER: We wanted to go against type for our depiction of Satan. There have, of course, been many portrayals of the Prince of Darkness in both comics and film over the years so finding a new approach was a bit of a challenge. In the TV show Lucifer, he’s presented as a suave and sardonic Euro-model type and in the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, Lucifer is presented as beautiful and ambisexual—portrayed by actress Gwendoline Christie but referred to as “he”—appearing at times almost benevolent but sporting large black bat or dragon wings. We decided to design Satan as a child, a young prepubescent boy with black eyes. The inspiration was meant to reflect that Satan had once been innocent until his dark vision doomed him to damnation.
We also establish the fact that the Prince of Evil appears in different forms to different people, based on their cultural backgrounds. To my mind, the incarnation that Satan presents to Vlad might’ve been the image of a young boy that Dracula had ordered to be impaled in one of his massive, brutal purges—a child that might’ve taken a particularly long and painful time to die and whose screams might’ve haunted even the merciless warlord’s dreams. We never explicitly explain this idea, but I feel that’s not really necessary in a lot of creative concepts, so long as the artist knows where they draw their inspiration from, then some of that juice is bound to find its way into the reader’s or viewer’s perception of things.
The long embroidered red cloak that Satan wears is our nod to the Francis Ford Coppola 1992 film adaptation. The moment when we see Satan revealed in his true form, after Dracula tries to stab him with a silver crucifix, is all Kelley’s brainchild. In my script, the description on that page simply reads, “HIS SATANIC MAJESTY now stands revealed in his true diabolical form.” I left the rest up to Kelley’s vibrant imagination and, holy shit…did he deliver! I love the fact that Satan wears a crown of horns as opposed to a crown of thorns. And that the faces of the damned burble up through his flesh here and there like Hellish cankers.
KAPLAN: If I remember correctly, this is book three in a four-volume series. What can you tease about the final volume of Dracula?
WAGNER: Only to say that in the novel, Prof. Van Helsing spends some time talking about vampires and how to destroy them. And then, in the book’s exciting grand finale…the heroes really don’t dispatch him in any of those manners. So, how we plan to address that conundrum as our story continues into Book IV will have to remain a mystery for now.
KAPLAN: There is A LOT of Dracula content in the world. For people who aren’t die-hard Drac fans like myself, who will consume anything in that vein, can you give them an elevator pitch on why your series is worth supporting?
WAGNER: Well, to some degree, this is a you-will-or-you-won’t proposition. Truthfully, if someone has an absolute aversion to horror narratives, they’re probably not gonna like this. And that’s fine…every story and every enjoyment isn’t for every person. I have a complete and total apathy towards professional sports…I don’t ever watch any pro sports of any kind, even the Super Bowl, which seems to be a ubiquitous must-see for even non-sports fans. I’m what a friend of mine termed “asportual,” and there ain’t nothin’ gonna change that condition. So, I get it if horror just isn’t your thing.
But, if you’re even an occasional consumer of horror, then I think you’d definitely enjoy our take on the most famous of all monsters. Our epic saga of these untold stories about Dracula combines history, drama, shocks, sensuality and the supernatural to bring what most of our readers consider a fresh and vibrant rendering of what many might consider to be material that has been done to death (or undeath). Most importantly, we don’t romanticize the character; this isn’t a love story, as so many film adaptations have presented it. There’s none of that in the original novel…he has no tender feelings towards either of the novel’s main two female characters. Dracula is a creature of lust…not love. He lusts for power, for dominion and for blood. As he says on the first page of Book I—The Implaer, “I am such hunger INCARNATE!” And that sure as hell sounds like the sort of story I’d wanna read!
KAPLAN: Can you tell me more about the unique aspects of this Kickstarter campaign? Any exciting backer rewards? Stretch goals? Hopes to surpass your own record as one of Kickstarter’s Top 20 most successful graphic novel campaigns?
WAGNER: We really don’t do stretch goals. Everything’s available from the very start of the campaign, but we do try to provide a wide array of rewards at a variety of price points. One of our most premium rewards this time around is a limited number of pieces of original art. It’s probably not generally known, but Kelley doesn’t sell much of his original art and, as a result, what pieces of his do find their way onto the market are always in high demand. With the campaign for Book III-The Count, we’re offering a unique and first-time artistic collaboration between the two of us—10 pieces of original art, portraits of Dracula that are drawn by Kelley and then colored/painted by me. Needless to say, this is a pretty pricey rewards tier, but, last I checked, there weren’t many of these left available…they were almost immediately snatched up. But we’re also offering color portfolios with beautiful reproductions of all 10 pieces, which will be much more affordable. We also have some cool merch…t-shirts and a hat…as well as our per-usual three editions of the book itself, two standard editions with Kelley’s main cover art and my variant cover art version as well as a signed and limited edition.
KAPLAN: How has your collaborative process developed over the course of the series?
WAGNER: Stand back…I’m gonna gush! Working with Kelley has been an absolute dream, and we both comment on how natural the whole collaboration seems, as if we’d been working together for years and had already developed some creative symbiosis. Seriously, Kelley claims that these scripts are the best he’s ever gotten, and I contend that these books will one day be considered Kelley’s magnum opus—the best work he’s ever done. I find myself constantly writing scenes where I think Kelley is gonna absolutely slay it…and then his pencils arrive and, holy shit, they’re even better than I had imagined! And I’m an artist myself, so, needless to say, I’m always imagining something great…and he exceeds my expectations at every turn. I was saying to him the other day—and I’m not being hyperbolic here—that I feel like our pairing is right up there with comic history’s greatest pairings. We all know the stellar teams I’ve speaking of here…and I really feel like we’re soaring in that rarified stratosphere with this project. It’s all just as natural and as gratifying as it could possibly be.
KAPLAN: Is there anything else you want to add?
WAGNER: Nothing other than to add some specifics. If you haven’t yet checked out our Dracula series of graphic novels, you can still purchase Books I & II in the campaign for Book III. The campaigns are the exclusive source for the hardcover editions of these books, which are published in the larger European-album format as opposed to standard American comics size. And if hardcovers aren’t your jam, Dark Horse Comics also releases TPB versions of the books that are available both online and at your LCS. Kelly and I both hope you’ll check out this series, which is a true labor of love for both of us. “Enter freely…and of your own will.”
You can back “Dracula: Book III-The Count” on Kickstarter! Remember, the union wants you to keep supporting the platform’s creators, even while the strike is ongoing!
Like this:
Like Loading…
