On this Day of the Dead I thought I'd talk about DRACULA; CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT by answering a few of the questions that have been trickling in-- keep 'em coming too!
1. Why aren't you setting this in the Victorian era like the original novel?Quite simply-- I'm not a big fan of the gaslight era, but I am a big fan of the 30s and 40s. I spent a lot of time thinking about this-- when Bram Stoker wrote the novel he merely made it contemporary-- the timeline was incidental to the story. When Universal filmed the Bela Lugosi version in 1931 they followed suit and put Dracula in contemporary London. It wasn't until Hammer Studios made their version in the 50s with Christopher Lee that the character was again back in a 1897ish setting. There have been a number of films featuring Dracula in the present day and not one of them any good. So I decided to place this in 1931/1932 and go from there. I love the fashion, the cars and the whole global climate of a world on the brink of war and the fallen economic stature of the world powers.
2. Is this a literal adaption of DRACULA? I'd like to use this like Cliff Notes for my school project.Nope, I'm afraid not. I'll be following the overall plot of Stoker's novel for the first 3 books, but I'm tinkering with it-- and yes I know that is something that makes me whince when I hear it from someone else but I really think I have a handle on this version I'm crafting. My final decision of making these changes was a conversation I had with master horror artist Berni Wrightson who told me while he loved Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, he found Stoker's DRACULA deathly boring-- sacrilidge that was a shared sentiment for me. While I love the character-- I actually had to buy the Cliff Notes and use them the way you're supposed to to help me read the novel itself, I just found it very dry.
3. What changes are you making?I don't want to give away too much, but I'm basically taking Stoker's novel as a skeleton for the plot and adding in elements of Murnau's 1922 film NOSFERATU, 1978's SALEM'S LOT, 1931's DRACULA and much of the feel of 1935's BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and mixing it up with the supernatural and folklore of the era.
Recently I worked Lon Chaney into the story-- the famed actor who played a vampire in LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT and who was the first choice to play Dracula when Universal decided to make the film but who died in 1930 before pre production even began-- if you note the timeline you'll realize Chaney is dead when the story takes place.
I'm also adding ghosts, werewolves and Scotland Yard to the story-- especially in Book 4 (and possibly 5) which will cover the events directly after Stoker's novel ended.
If you can imagine a big budget Universal flick made in the early 30s and directed by James Whale you won't be far off from what you're going to see in DRACULA; CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT.
4. I liked your HARKER story that you previewed here. Why did you change it?It's a combination of things, most of all at my recent gallery show in Boston where I had a lot of the pages up on display-- seeing them all hanging together I realized my style was all over the place-- from serious to cartoony-- intially I wanted to do this in a very stylized cartoony way like artist Richard Sala but realized that wasn't my natural style so it was difficult to keep the art that way.
About thirty minutes into the show my good buddy Tony Antetomaso came up to me and said he really liked the way Dracula looked and that it had "six different styles in it!" which he meant as a compliment but it just added to my thoughts on it.
Then I met with Marvel Comics Joe Quesada's assistant who said that Joe was a fan of my work but he was confused that the artist who did TURKEY BOY and FLY was the same artist who was doing the much more serious style art for BATMAN 1939, and I reached the conclusion that I needed to work in my "real" style.
So I spent the end of the summer figuring out that style-- and that's what you'll be seeing here. I like it-- and it also gave me a chance to rework the storyline a bit more-- so while much of what you saw in the preview remains in the story-- only TWO pages from the eighty plus I've drawn are going to be used in the new take.
5. When will this be in stores?I'm giving myself an ambitious deadline of having the WHOLE thing in comic stores next October-- and releasing it in shorter book segments starting next spring. So I can say with most certainty that the final graphic novel will be in Diamond PREVIEWS catalog next summer for purchase in October, while the individual books will be available here on this website and in a few select comic shops starting next Spring.
