Dracula: An Interview with Matt Wagner & Kelley Jones

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Well, today we have not one, but two comic book legends with us.

First, we have artist writer Matt Wagner, creator of such legendary characters as Grendel, Mage, and the author of one of my personal favorite series, Sandman Mystery Theater.

We also have artist Kelly Jones, legendary for his work on Batman, and one of, if not the best artist, I'm sorry, Matt, to ever draw the Sandman.

Well, I'll take that one because it's true.

But today.

And actually, that's how Kelly and I met because we both drew, he drew the bulk of Seasons of the Mist, which is the most famous Sandman story arc.

I drew one chapter in that.

And

so we were both...

together with a lot of the PR tour stuff and that's how we first met.

Yeah, Matt, I mean, you, hell, you co-created Dead Boy Detectives, you know, but right?

Like, I mean,

yeah, I don't take much credit for that.

Because, again, it was just that one issue.

They weren't detectives yet.

It's just, no, they were detective.

They were just a couple of ghosty high school kids, you know.

So, uh, okay, so you created the dead boy part.

Yeah, there you go.

The dead boy part, not the detective part, yeah.

I always like a good guy who creates dead boys.

It's good for our show.

It really, it helps.

I'm glad it's a good interview.

And I will say, uh, uh, uh, you know, DC, the way they credit you is whoever drew it first, they get the credit.

Right.

And I don't feel like I deserve it because I didn't do them as those characters, as the detectives.

And yet when they had that one season of the show, I got a bit of money out of it, you know, and I was just like,

okay.

I mean, it wasn't, you know, I didn't quit my job, but

get that money, dude.

Yeah.

You know, I've created about a half dozen characters I had no idea I created.

And he's right.

I looked and I said, I don't even know who this is.

And they say, you did it.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that both of you have just, you know, drawn and written so much over the years.

Like, do you sometimes just forget things that you've done?

Sometimes, yeah.

Details.

Details more than

whole movements or anything like that.

But yeah, it takes.

You know, for instance, I know George R.R.

Martin has a dude that helps him keep track of everything in Westeros because he's lost track of all that shit, you know.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, just little things here and there.

But no, for the most part, I can keep track of it pretty well.

Maybe you could finish that.

We're busy on something else right now.

Oh, I mean, before we get to your current project, I do have to bring up something that, Kelly, you may have forgotten that you did way back in the day.

I'm sure I did.

But it was a,

it's, I realized this morning when I was looking at the books that you've done over the years, I realized that you were the very first artist to really have an effect on me as a child, the first comic book to really have like a huge effect on me.

Dino Riders.

Dino Riders.

Yeah.

I still have the toys.

Really?

Yeah, they sent, they, I was under contract with Marvel then.

And because I had started on the Micronauts, they simply just assumed you do licensing.

Yeah.

So I didn't get a say in it.

And one day I got this gigantic box of toys

and I had no idea what, why, and it said from Marvel, right?

It came from Marvel.

I had no idea what it was.

And then they get a hold of me and said,

about a day or so later, so I have no clue.

And they said, you have been assigned this.

The scripts are being written, blah, blah, blah.

And when you're under contract, you have no say.

Yeah.

And

that sucks, ass.

Yo, it did.

It did.

It did because you don't get a say.

And I didn't, I, when I was on Micronauts, though it was licensed, you could invent stuff and you could make up things.

And they didn't care because the toys they quit making.

These went through like layers of people

to approve one page.

So I quit, but I didn't tell them, I didn't tell them I'm quitting.

I just

accepted a job from DC.

And I just said, okay, whatever they do, they do.

You know, they can.

And it wasn't worth pursuing you.

I can't, because I can't get through this.

And one of the great moments of my career besides working with Matt was this went on for about two or three months.

I drew a few and then I just couldn't deal with this anymore.

But I went over to DC.

Well, in that time,

I'm wondering, when are they going to call and say, where's the art?

You know, I was completely unprofessional, but I was so angry because I kept saying, get me off, get me off, get, and they wouldn't do it.

Take me off this thing.

And then I find out that they had canceled all the license books.

And because of that,

they owed me a lot of money.

I had signed this contract.

So I get this

very large check, larger than I've gotten from anything they did.

And I was still, and I was working on Deadman.

So it was like one of those,

you know,

I made the right decision for all the, you know, I did it.

I should have said, I'm just quitting, but they wouldn't take no for an answer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because nobody wanted to do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we got this guy yoked in.

Right.

And so I remember everyone saying, God, you really changed.

And I go, no, I never got to be there.

You know, you, you didn't get to be who you were.

So,

you know, it was one of those good things because

Dead Man turned everything around, but I owe it to Air Raiders and I owe it to Diner Riders.

I owe it to this guy.

That's like getting an inheritance from a relative you didn't know existed.

Yeah, I always felt like, I felt like Jed Clampett.

I oiled people.

But hey, you know, whether you, you know, whether you really cared about it or not, like that, that art, like it truly disturbed me when I was a kid.

The one professional part was I put everything I could into it.

Yeah.

Because I realized this isn't the fan's fault.

This is me and an editor and the company.

So you never, you always, you always put your all into something, as ludicrous as it was.

And I'll be honest with you, I don't have bad feelings about it because I have an enormous amount of people love those books.

Yeah.

I get offers because I just put the original art in a box and said, who's going to want it?

Everybody want it.

i it is one of the most requested things are those two licensed books

like for not some dino writers

they it is uh you know it was designed for kids so i got to remember what was i into as a kid well i would love it too whatever those things were you know it's one of the reasons was it was it i don't know dino writer was it gruesome did you make it gruesome oh yeah oh yeah that's what that's what disturbed me because i was like six and i was like oh here's a guy like i remember someone getting eaten by a dinosaur?

That was me.

I find that you do things because you do things to get fired.

Yeah.

Well, that seriously, that your attempt to get fired changed my entire life.

Yeah.

But like, it really,

it really, that was my first introduction to like gore, to horror, all kinds of stuff.

The visual idea is great.

Like

weapons on dinosaurs and guys fighting.

Well,

that's cool.

But then they wouldn't go as far as they should.

So I went as far as I could.

And I started doing a thing where I turn in everything really late.

So they had to approve it.

So you got people getting eaten and killed and whatever.

And I got a lot of pushback on it.

And then, like I said,

when you're doing stuff and you're trying to bring that extra whatever and you're getting, that's where you're getting shit on.

You just, all right, fine.

I'm out of here.

And, and then, and then I watched, because I watch all my goofy friend artists, and they were pulling stunts all the time and would still get work.

Yeah.

So I thought, this will be my one time.

I'll change it and I'll do this stuff.

And what's good is it carried over to Deadman because I was so angry at that time.

I said,

they said, well, you know, Neil Adams, Deadman.

And so I just said, no, my version and fire me then.

I had a bad fire me.

point of my career.

And that's that's like early in the early in the Vertigo days, we weren't allowed to say the word fuck.

Yeah.

You know, even though it was supposedly adult-aimed comics, we weren't allowed to say fuck.

So Neil Gaiman and I used to talk about how if you had something questionable you wanted to get through, you would throw a fuck or two into the script.

Yeah.

And then that's all they would focus on.

You got to take that fuck out.

Yeah.

Everything else good?

Yeah, fine.

What are the dirty words for comics?

Like, is there a list?

Is there a George Carlin seven dirty words or is it just fuck?

No, I'm sure, you know, cunt and shit and piss and all that.

You're talking about mainstream comics.

Like, I've always done indie comics.

I've done some mainstream stuff, but Jesus Christ, man, my stuff's foul.

Yeah.

You should read his scripts because in his scripts, he's really foul in describing what he wants.

And I'm like, going, this is wonderful.

Matt finds 14th century curse words.

And I'm like, that's just wonderful.

Speaking of 14th century curse words, the reason why that we brought the two of you in today is to discuss your incredibly innovative new take on everyone's favorite Eastern European warlord, Dracula.

Dracula.

So, I mean, your take on Dracula, it's one of those ideas that you can't believe you've never seen it before.

You can't believe that no one's ever done this.

Is that y'all are telling the story of Dracula from the perspective of Dracula?

Yeah.

And it's one of those ideas, like you can't, like I told my wife about it.

She's like, oh my God, I've always wanted to hear that.

I've always wanted to hear that.

She's a massive fan of the Bram Stoker book.

But it just, for some reason, never occurred to people to just tell the story.

So I've been stewing it on for, I want to say more than a decade on, I always wanted to try my hand at Dracula.

But what do you do?

It's been done to death, you know.

And,

you know, the original novel is what's described as epistolary, which means it's told in the form of there's no omniscient narrator, letters, journals, news articles.

and the one voice missing is Dracula.

And, you know, it works in the original novel because it makes him a sinister kind of other, a presence, you know.

But after this long, we deserve to see here his point of view, right?

You know, so I finally realized what we need to do is not adapt the novel.

We need to tell everything else that the novel only hints at and doesn't tell.

Like, for instance, book one, which is called The Impaler.

Twice in the original novel, Van Helsing mentions that when he was alive, Dracula attended something called the Scolomance, which is an Eastern European legend about this seminary for the dark arts that Satan himself hosts way up in the mountains.

And it's a seven-year tenure, and he takes 10 students every time, every tenure, and then at the end of that, he keeps one of them.

And I thought,

why the how could we have fucking done anything with this before?

This is so, this is such a deep well of story to be told, you know.

And so that was our beginning, you know.

And then the second one's called The Brides, because

the three Van Pyric women make this indelible appearance in the novel and they're only there for three pages and i was like well we got to hear their story too we got to hear how he got each one of them and who they were before they became his brides you know and uh

The new one, we're getting ready to launch in just a few days, the Kickstarter.

We do all these as Kickstarter campaigns.

Nice.

And the new one, any fan of the novel knows that once the action shifts from his castle in Transylvania to the streets of London, Victorian London, he's offstage for the rest of the novel.

He's just this shadowy presence, you know.

You get some reports of things he's done, but nothing first person account, right?

And

so we're showing you what he's doing because he's obviously doing something the whole time he's there, you know.

And we, you get to see everything that he does.

And

it's been a blast.

And, you know, I keep writing these sequences, thinking to myself, oh, Kelly's going to fucking nail this.

It's going to be so awesome.

And then he turns in the art and it's like better than I could have imagined it to be, you know, and I'm an artist too.

So I've imagined quite a bit.

And, you know, he, he,

it's such a beautiful synthesis between the two of us.

We, I, I liked your reaction, Marcus, to when you were saying, How did no one think of this?

Because when Matt called me about, do you really want to work together?

Because we'd known each other for so long and we'd always done this little uh two-step about working together.

And when he told me the idea, I reacted exactly the same way.

And he would just throw out

uh

the thing with uh the skull of or he would just throw out uh how did what are the backstories of the brides um and then when he told me the third one wouldn't be an adaption of what we know but a exploration of what he was up to i was reacting the same way and when that happens to you

uh i give matt all the credit for this because he had to do all the research it was his idea

In the 120 plus years of Dracula, no one's done this.

And it was completely interesting to me to, because when he first said Dracula, I said, well, what are we going to do with it?

And then he tells me this.

And so in three minutes, I went from Dracula to when do we fucking start?

So how much of this, like, because I never knew about Satan and Dracula being buddies.

You know, like,

and he was right.

There's the dracula, the devil teaching.

I'm like, well, where did I miss that?

Yeah, I thought, I completely went over that, like, skimmed over that as well.

Yeah.

And so, how much of this is your own creative license?

And how much of this is like strictly, is like come straight from?

Well, we are trying to stick religiously to the canon of the text.

And yet, as I said, so much of it is only kind of this vague hints, you know, of he mentions a school of mantz.

He doesn't say what went on there, you know.

But I took that opportunity to, I felt also

an important,

impetus to have a very special way for him to become a vampire.

Because I figured, you know, know, he's the OG vampire.

He's he's the name, you know, I maintain he's the most famous literary character of all time.

There's almost nowhere in the world you can say the name Dracula and people don't know who the fuck you're talking about.

Well, God, God's pretty big.

God's pretty big, too.

We're talking about fictional characters, yes.

God's pretty big.

But I thought, well, he's got a very special way to become a vampire.

He can't just get bitten by another vampire.

That's how every other fucking vampire becomes a vampire.

Therefore, that's boring.

So had to come up with a very special way for him to become a vampire, which we see in book one, you know.

And the rest of it, you know, like, Ed, you're asking how much of it's from the canon.

So regardless if it's, you know, I wouldn't say Dracula is considered by a lot of literary scholars as, you know, not on the level of Dickens or Tolstoy or, you know, these highbrow writers.

It's considered kind of a pulp.

thing.

Yeah.

And yet, it is one of the most dissected and annotated fucking books in the English language ever.

I have like four different annotated versions.

When I was writing this third one, I was working off a calendar.

Again, since it's told in the form of letters and journals, they're all dated.

So I had a calendar based upon the original text of what happens every goddamn day.

And I had to make it fit all that.

This thing even had the sunrise and sunset times and the phases of the moon.

Incredible.

That's all.

So I had to appeal and make sure I passed the sniff test for all the Dracula scholars.

Yet I also also had to make it so that if you've never read the book, you would still be interested in the story as it unfolds.

You know, so pretty.

The third one was pretty intense.

In a way, the third one's what we've been working toward since the beginning.

So I just had to worry about how much breasts and blood to put in.

So

speaking of breaths and blood, I actually do have a question for you.

Because,

Kelly, I mean, your horror stuff is just incredible.

Like, the way you draw pain and anguish in a way that's just so evocative,

But your gore

is just off the charts.

What's your favorite piece of gore to draw?

This is like the James Lipton, like, what's your favorite word?

Like, what's your favorite gore?

I think my favorite gore, if I, if I'm to be perfectly honest, are the little things.

It's the little things that look painful.

Yeah.

It can be, it can be a small thing like an

a needle in a finger or some something where I can do that because

I think everyone can relate to that kind of pain, to those kind of

moments.

In the second book, there's a scene where the villagers storm the castle and Dracula drives them away by commanding lightning and then summoning rats and bats.

And there's a scene where a bat is clinging to a woman's face and plucking out her eyeball with its teeth.

And I remember thinking, oh, wow, that looks painful.

But

horror has totally different tropes and shtick than superhero.

Yeah.

So

I try to take advantage of that as much as I can.

And Matt, and it's all characterization.

It's more characterization.

And Matt will do a thing where he

in why the books are so entertaining to draw is he does sequences all through its scenes.

And they all stitch together, but it's like you'll get a six to 10 page sequence, maybe.

And within that, it gives you something.

And so you get to build that atmosphere for that one shot or that one moment.

And I think that's what makes people react even stronger to it than if I just drew an axe murder going on.

And it's,

you know, this wonderful

grotesqueness

that Matt will write,

where it's unapologetic, non-biased.

There it is.

And then we move on.

So it isn't like, you know, you're getting off on it.

It's like you go, oh, that's disgusting, or that's frightening, or that's horrible, or that more importantly, painful.

Yeah, I mean, I had the reaction of damn quite a bit.

Matt doesn't do that

when I was reading.

Matt will do casual things.

Like

he casually

is, you know, there's this corrupt politician in the second one, and he gives Dracula this boy, and Matt just has him casually carry off the boy.

But they're discussing things the whole time, and that really bothered me.

You know, but I thought, yeah, that's cool.

I mean, at the same time, you're going,

Matt, kind of, it's like a psychological test.

How disturbed are you?

Because you find yourself enjoying it and then saying, Why am I enjoying this?

This horrible mayhem going on.

But I do because Matt,

everything's driven by character.

So you feel a lot, feel it much, much more.

To me.

Yeah, that's very important, especially with a contemporary vampire story, because again, vampire's been done to death.

Yeah.

And you have to do something to make people care, even just

in passing, about what's happening to these characters, you know.

Yeah, I mean, as far as the characterization of Dracula goes, like once you started like fleshing out this character that has not over the years been fleshed out all that much.

I mean, the most might be, you know, Brant, might be Francis Foricoppola, like giving him a romantic backstory.

But when you're fleshing out.

He's not there in the fucking book.

No, no, no.

Not even close.

Yeah.

His weird muscle armor.

Was there anything that you discovered about the character of Dracula that sort of surprised you?

Well, yeah, in that, so you have to keep him as this unrepentant villain, you know?

He doesn't, and also there's nothing romantic about him, you know.

Again, as I said, in the Coppola, I have this love-hate relationship with the Coppola movie because I adore the cinema of it.

His filmmaking in that is fucking brilliant, top to bottom.

Yeah, and you can't argue with Tom Waits as Renfield.

Well, no, I don't like the casting much, kind of top to bottom.

Oh, I think the casting's kind of all bad.

I'll get back to that in a second.

But the whole love story thing, just,

you know, once he gets to London and gets hooked up with Mina, he turns into this fucking fop for the most part.

You know, there's the scene where she, she's been fooling around with him and then Jonathan gets rediscovered and she rushes to his side to marry him.

And they have this sequence of Dracula, you know, weeping copiously and smashing things.

All right, Dracula does not fucking weep ever.

And

And so, you know, I just had to maintain that, you know, he's not full of remorse.

He doesn't have any remorse.

There's one little bit of remorse he shows at one point in one of the books.

But one thing I did find interesting is that he has these three brides that is in book two.

And I also had to be careful to not contemporize that.

He would not think of them as equals at all.

That whole concept, that modern day concept of marriage and relationships, not there at all.

And yet,

these are the first, he never had any children with his living wives.

These are the first things he's ever created, as opposed to destroyed.

So he feels some sense of responsibility for them.

He feels a need to provide for them.

He goes without eating himself to provide food for them, to provide blood for them.

So that was a,

and I wouldn't even call that a moment of humanity.

It's almost more of his megalomaniacal

sense in that, you know, I did this.

I have to maintain this.

This is part of my, these are my conquests.

I can't let them go.

I can't let them wither, you know?

No, the characterization that i loved is why he chose them that was the thing that got me was each one he can have anyone i guess he wants so

uh when i was reading this i thought oh this is interesting because as he he chooses each one of the girls um it's why he would it's what interests him so you get something from

dracula never thinks he's evil he never thinks oh i'm i'm evil he's doing what he does and his he knows knows he strikes terror though that's that's slightly different yeah but he but he did that as a warlord yeah right um so that that to me was cool so when you get the other side of like why would he be with each one of these girls what is

that's fascinating it's horrific

it's and it's and it's for three different reasons because they're each three very distinct women

that complexity of of of the brides as well as him uh i always describe matt as literary pulp and that's it it's it's like boy boy, you don't need that, but when you get it, you're saying, how can you read this without that?

That's so much grist for me.

Another cool thing about the brides is once he gets each of them, one of the things that first attracted each of them to him, they kind of lose that when they catch his contagion, right?

His gift destroys part of what he liked about them to begin with, you know?

Yeah.

Of course.

So, I mean, so Matt, you know, you're kind of, I guess, you know how to do an anti-hero.

Like that, that, like, you absolutely know how to do that.

So, so what do you, what is it that you think we gain from hearing stories from the perspectives of villains, like the direct perspective of a villain?

Because we each have a villain inside of us, baby.

You know what I mean?

You recognize it.

You recognize God, but therefore, the grace of God go I, you know, I mean, when somebody's behaving like an absolute fucking shit, you think to those times in your life when you behaved like an absolute fucking shit.

And it might have not been for the same reasons or in the same manner, but but you know, you know, there's a famous quote from Marcel Proust that he never heard of a crime committed by man that he didn't imagine himself fully capable of doing.

And, you know,

that's what I love about anti-heroes, you know, and just that they're so unrepentant, you know.

So,

you know,

we have enough redemption stories.

Fuck that.

It was crazy reading it because you know Dracula is a bad guy.

He's like the most notorious bad guy in the world.

But, you know, I'm reading this thing.

I'm like, ah, you know, I get it.

I like you.

Yeah, well, I can point you to another very famous example of that.

Hannibal fucking Lecter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

He's he's horrible.

And yet, all through Signs of the Land, you're like, he's got to get out of there.

Yeah.

I can't wait to see how he gets out of there.

And at the end, when he calls her and he's going to go eat that dude, you're like, yeah, get that.

The fucking dude needs it.

What I found interesting about it is, I don't know if this was Kelly or you, Matt, because Vlad the Impaler, you know, I'm also like very, like, I'm not a huge dracula nerd like like everyone else in this room like i obviously am

but vlad the impaler i always thought we he used heads not like no no no it's whole bodies baby up the poop chute for the most part or the entire that was

that's his that's his that's also terribly excruciating about it is the weight of your body would slowly pull you down and and that would like dig its way up through your innards you know wow

horrific way to die head on a pike that's like that that everyone did head on a pike pike.

That was

Andrew.

You don't get the lead when they put your head on a pike.

You know what I mean?

The head's come off already, right?

No, impalement's just an awful, awful way to go.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, so this Dracula, I mean, this is a monstrous Dracula.

This is not a romantic or a sexy vampire, but you know, vampires have over the years kind of gone more towards that area, more towards like a bit softer, a bit sexier.

well sure with Anne Rice and and the Twilight shit you know sure like

but then you look at something like Robert Edgar's version of Nosferatu you know which which really pulled it back to being this foul disgusting creature you know it was very cool only other time I've seen the beard and the mustache

other than you guys is that is that accurate too that's accurate yeah he wears a mustache to basically to hide his teeth Yeah, he's not, he's not, he can't retract the fangs like so many modern cinematic interpretations.

Yeah, what did you think of asthmatic Nosferatu?

Oh, I loved it.

Now, you know,

I've loved every Kelly too.

We've talked about this extensively.

We love every version of that film, you know, the

Murnell version, the Herzog version, and the Eggers version.

Now, that said, that is not Taylor.

That is not Dracula.

That's not Dracula.

Dracula is a different character.

Dracula is not

a decaying corpse.

He's also much more courtly than that.

The thick Romanian accent, you know, that's not in the book at all.

That Harker comments to him, he's trying real hard to perfect his English so he can fit in and not attract attention when he's in England.

And Harker comments to him twice, oh, you speak great English.

You don't have any accent at all.

You know, the accent we're so familiar with comes from the Bell Lugosi film version.

Lugosi was Romanian and spoke almost no English.

So he had to learn his lines phonetically.

So that accent became the, you know, default Dracula accent, but again, not in the book.

Yeah.

So besides Dracula, what other vampires do you love?

And Nosferatu, of course.

Oh,

Kel, you got anything that you want to jump in there with?

I really like Count Yorga.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I dig him quite a bit.

I think

there's little touches they did that I always liked.

that

he knows all these languages.

So when a deaf person comes up, he communicates and sign.

And I thought, that's nice.

That was pretty good.

And he's sadistic in it.

Yeah.

Of course.

There's a lot of good film versions.

I've gone through a lot of

film versions.

First of all, both the book and the film of Let the Right One In are some of my favorite things ever.

You know,

the film, you know, to my mind, the best horror is always about something else other than the scares, you know?

Yeah.

You know, Rosemary's Baby is about fear of pregnancy, you know, and Let the Right One In is about loneliness, you know, it's about the loneliness of being a bullied 12-year-old boy or a 200-year-old vampire, you know.

And that one is just so poignant and so

delicate at the same time as being scary as shit, you know.

I'm reading a new one right now by a new horror author.

Well, now he's not that new, but a guy I really like named Keith Rosin, who lives here in Portland.

And his brand new book's called Coffin Moon, and it's a vampire book.

I'm about halfway through it.

It's terrific.

There's a Native Native American writer named Stephen Graham Jones.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with him.

He was my creative writing professor in college.

Oh, shit.

Wow.

Yeah, I actually.

He's a small fucking world, man.

I actually used to lend him comics when I was in college.

Like, I lent him my entire run of the Max.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

And he's like, yeah, he once showed up to my house at 8 a.m.

to return them on a Saturday after I was extraordinarily hungover.

How did he like dino writers?

His most recent book's called The Buffalo Hunter-Hunter, and it's about a Native American vampire, and it's terrific.

I got to read it.

Really, really great.

There was a one just a number of years ago called Bite Marks.

Do you remember that one, Kelly?

I turned you on to that one.

Yeah, that was a good one.

That was

that.

That one's rough, man.

Yeah.

That's some rough shit in it.

At the risk of you guys talking shit about something that could

make you upset.

How do you feel about blade oh love blade yeah love blade yeah

blade's great blade's great yeah that's a lot

blade uh

oh oh and i'm totally remiss for not mentioning sinners holy

yeah yeah yeah yeah sinners was incredible sinners is like dust of dawn done right classy from dust till dawn is all i've already yeah yeah

uh

uh uh

blade you know blade uh uh uses one thing I want to point out is, you know, the whole can that seems to run through almost every vampire myth is the whole

vampire destroys, sunlight destroys a vampire.

Again, not so in Dracula, not so in the book.

I don't know how well you remember the Coppola movie.

In the book, he can walk around during the sun

daylight hours.

He's just not as powerful.

He gets his full vampiric powers at night.

And he has to sleep during the day on a bed of his own soil to fully recharge his powers.

But if you recall the Coppola movie, when he first meets Mina, it's on the streets of London during broad daylight.

Yeah.

You know?

But yeah,

Blade is just full of those, you know, just vampires bursting into dust and dust and flame.

Just awesome.

I love it.

Like a lot of franchises, though, it went downhill fast.

You know, number one and two were great.

I don't know.

One of my favorite things to see is to watch a vampire explode.

That's going to make me happy every single time if a vampire explodes for whatever reason.

Great scene of that and let the right one in where the one guy's girlfriend gets bitten and she's turning and

she asks the hospital attendant to open the window because she knows that will destroy her and she just bursts into this ball of flame that's like licking the ceiling immediately, you know?

Yeah.

You know what one isn't good, but I love it anyway?

John Carpenter.

There's a lot of those.

John's vampires.

Yeah.

Which one?

Yeah.

John Carpenter's Vampires.

Yeah.

It's a bad movie.

It's a bad movie.

I know it's a bad movie, but I'll put it on anytime i can appreciate that ed i can totally

speaking of carpenter we just got a quote a blurb from carpenter an endorsement really yeah well i take it back then thank mr jones for that one

no i mean the the blurbs that y'all have been getting for this book i mean i i am not alone in saying that this book is incredible i mean the the the reaction that y'all have got from from this like how does it feel to have so many people just say like holy shit, this is the Dracula story that I've been waiting to hear to read my entire life?

Well, it makes me feel like, wow,

we got it right.

Because, of course, you never know going into it.

You know, you might hit a lot of resistance, but I don't know.

This is from the very beginning, as Kelly said, when I first started outlining to him what I wanted to do.

And I was seeing his reaction.

I was like, yeah, we're really on to something here.

You know, it's, it's, it's working.

You know, I never

tell.

I couldn't tell anybody.

I, I, I mean, I would read this.

He would tell me this.

I didn't want it out there.

And so I was alone with this for a while.

We sat on it for a while.

And it was driving me crazy

because I knew how I was reacting.

So when I started hearing other people

when they would read the first one or whatever and react the exact same way, then I knew I,

well, I always knew Matt was onto something.

Because I know this stuff pretty well.

And I felt stupid when he was telling me this stuff.

Why didn't I think of this?

And then very entertained when I would read it.

How do you sustain this idea?

And when he said, well, in the first one,

which is,

I think,

a great

how he got there.

And he really doesn't become a vampire till the very end.

Yeah.

It sustained interest.

Yeah.

At the same time, we had to make him very recognizable as dragon.

In lesser hands, in lesser hands,

what Matt wrote would be dreadfully boring.

It would be.

And I always told him, I said, this would be great if someone drew it in stick figures because it's just all there.

And it's the ideas.

I'm very big on ideas.

I think ideas, if you've got those,

that really is compelling to people.

And Matt had ideas everywhere on this.

I mean, just

from just how you do a good comic book to what you're going to say to bringing a new light on something.

All of it was working, all of it.

And it is all I can do.

And I mean, people will say to me,

you know,

how you go about sustaining that energy.

It's very easy.

I mean, like I said, he writes all these scenes, which

for me, I like because people,

when they like something, they'll describe something they like.

And I found most, most,

this happens to me the most with what Matt's done.

They tell me so much from both the first books.

Yeah.

They'll just go on and on and on about, and this scene, and this scene, and this scene.

And I'm going, well, that's what I thought.

That's why I'm not, you know, I'm like, and a lot of stuff too will just pop up.

I mean, there are things I don't pre-plan anything.

I don't do thumbnails.

I don't do anything.

I work very emotionally.

So I want to feel it that day.

I'll read Matt's stuff over a lot and

sometimes I'll get an idea, but most of the time that idea is rejected by the time I get to actually drawing it.

And then I always think, well, how can I

really emphasize what Matt's doing here?

And that's where it comes together really well, because I don't know that a lot of this stuff's going to happen.

Some stuff I think is going to be really gory, isn't it?

becomes very gory and I didn't

think of it that way.

But that's the pleasure of working with someone who's figured it out.

There's no plot holes with Matt.

There's no, I don't understand this.

So at that point, you kind of bend the knee because you realize somebody put a lot of effort, thinking, research to scare the hell out of you.

And it works that he does do that.

I'll read it and go, Jesus Christ.

Even down to fellas, you have a.

You have a copy of the first volume sitting in front of you there.

Yeah.

The logo we use is the same logo that was on the very first 1897 hardcover edition.

Hell yeah.

That's great.

Keeping it real.

Now,

if this is too much of a spoiler for the first book, please tell us to not put it in the episode.

But I'm curious.

Why was Satan a boy?

Just because it's the opposite of what you expect.

Yeah.

And he looks, and he looks.

I mean, you get to see what he really is later.

Yeah.

And he presents himself differently to everybody.

Yeah.

There's that one scene where all the various scholars, depending on their nationality, are describing how they see him, and it's all basically derivative of their own mythologies.

Yeah, so what was it about like the Eastern European mythology, like Dracula's mythology, that made him see Satan as oh, it's Catholic-based, you know, and and I'm sure in my mind, it was it was some little boy that he had fucking impaled, yeah, some peasant boy, you know.

Yeah, that was one of the things the first time.

And Dracula's response is, I don't give a shit, you know.

Like Satan tried to freak me out.

Fuck you, Satan.

Yeah, right, right.

I was there.

I saw that thing go up his asshole.

Yeah, because right up top, when you see the impaled people and he's still flat and he's still in charge and shit, you see a little boy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's what I thought when I read it.

That's why I put the little boy there.

I didn't think it would be that, but I thought that's what Matt was thinking:

this is somebody or a presentation of

somebody he did this to?

Yeah, you know, this is not endemic to that time period.

I mean, look at the look at the casualties in Gaza.

Yeah.

You know, I mean,

it's

indiscriminate of age and class and sex and everything.

You know, war destroys everything.

Any war.

Yeah, any war is like that.

And

considering that

Vlod doesn't see himself as a sick guy, but using that as a psychological terror weapon, which worked in real life, it worked.

worked um no he's not even he's it it's a means to his end so he's not even thinking about uh

geez i really shouldn't have done that that's

um he's thinking man those shrieks will keep the turks away yeah and then in book two we had a sequence where uh so in in the actual novel um

uh you only ever see him prey on women, right?

You get the feeling that, sure, he bites guys, but you only ever see him prey on women.

And if you go down the Ann Rice route, you know, all the vampires are ambisexual.

You know, they

have sex with men and women.

Doesn't, you know, you live that long and it doesn't matter to you.

You know, party time.

So I had to figure out a reason why he only preys on women.

And I took as inspiration

certain predators, like we've all seen a cat play with a mouse.

Right.

And

I know from the

sequence of orcas you you did with SeaWorld that Ed, you were the host on that one.

Yeah.

That orcas can toss a seal around in the air for an hour.

Well, why do they do this?

And certain annual behavioralists will say, well, they're honing their skills.

And I'm like, really?

They already caught the thing.

How's this honing the skills?

And my thought was always, maybe this just makes it taste better.

Oh, like, maybe somehow, maybe somehow the fear juices are marinating that meat and it just tastes tastes better, you know?

So Dracula goes on and on about how women just taste better.

Like

he says there's a certain assertive tang in the gore of males.

That's the thing I love.

Stuff I've not thought of.

And when he said that, I went, that really helps me draw this.

You know, that does, because then I see him being more

rather than seductive,

more culinary.

Consumptive.

Yeah, he's culinary about it.

yeah yeah you know if i had to meet a person i'd choose a woman yeah there you go there you go

when i when i remember telling my wife about that she goes that's yeah that's exactly what would i mean

there's so many things matt does i always run it by her and i'll say well okay what would you react to and she always goes no that's good that's good and it's all horrible things happening to women um so she'll go no that's scary that that you know if it's passed if it passes your artist's wife test yeah you're good

yeah

So I'll always say it like, well, would this bug you?

And she goes, no, that's really good.

Don't change that.

And I'm like going, okay, that's good.

In book three, when he's in London,

I have him describe the taste of everybody he bites.

And in most cases, it has to do with their social status.

Like, I remember one is she tasted of liniment and broken dreams.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, and it varies from whether it's a man or a woman or high class or low class, you you know.

Yeah.

And so when you're writing something like this, like something like Dracula that's been done so many times, and I'm sure you've seen basically every, you know, every Dracula adaptation out there and probably read quite a few of them as well.

Like, how do you kind of keep the ideas of other people out of your head?

That's tough.

And I do stay away from certain things.

Like when we started this, I deliberately did not go check out Marv Wolfman and Gene Colin's long-running classic run at Marvel Comics to Madracula, which is where Blade was first introduced.

That was so much material.

I thought, well,

I don't want to cross over with something they might have done consciously.

If I do it accidentally, fine.

But I deliberately, deliberately stayed away from those.

I loved reading those too.

So when I got on this, I just took all those books I used to and put them away.

When I was doing Batman, I wouldn't read Batman comics from the artists I love.

I mean, I went on a 10-year not reading it.

It was because you don't want to be influenced by it or, or, or take the same ground if, you know, consciously or unconsciously, you try not to.

And speaking of cross-hour material, I don't know if you guys know this or not.

Have either of you ever seen the Dan Curtis-directed 70s TV movie starring Jack Palance?

No.

It's adapted by Richard Matheson, by the legendary fucking Richard Matheson.

Twilight's pretty dramatic.

It's pretty darn good.

I think it's excellent.

I think it's an excellent movie.

thing.

It's where they first introduced the theory that Mina is the reincarnation of his long-lost love.

Yeah, it's excellent.

But

that was on when they were developing Tuma Dracula.

And so artist Gene Colin based his Dracula on Jack Paulance.

Yes, and he did a great job of it.

It gave him a little mustache, but if you go and look, it's got like this broad face and a broad mouth like Jack Paulance and the eyes kind of beady.

And he's mean as shit in that, too.

Yeah, he is mean as shit.

Is there any like Dracula lore?

You're like, fuck it, that's stupid.

Like, I didn't see anything about garlic

in the first book or anything.

We get to garlic, yeah.

I mean, he's so powerful.

I have that most of it doesn't affect him all that much.

It's also, you know, the whole thing with the Scolomance.

First of all, in the novel, we don't see many other vampires, and they're all women.

But he exhibits powers way beyond.

what the other ones have.

You can see them, mainly what they do is they can turn into a mist and materialize here and there.

But you never see them command the weather or transform into animals or command animals, you know, and my approach was that's all shit.

That's all necromancy that he learned at the Scolomance.

You know, that's outside of vampiric powers.

We do bring in garlic in the third one.

Crosses and stuff, though.

Like there's...

There's a famous, it's actually a pretty good movie, but it has a silly fucking ending.

It's Hammer's second film called Brides of Dracula.

did not star christopher lee christopher lee didn't come back for that one and it's got a lot of good stuff in it it does but at the very end they they turn a windmill so that the arms of the windmill are across and and he gets kind of like fucked up by the cross now that doesn't make any sense because there are crosses in architecture everywhere you look you know picket fences are full of crosses you know he wouldn't be able to go anywhere so my approach is it has to be wielded with a faith behind it an active faith too not not a cursory or a casual faith, you know, to have an effect on him.

Oh, so if you're an atheist and show Dracula across, it don't.

Ain't going to do shit, buddy.

Yep.

Hell yeah.

Yep.

I think he would be the best.

If Dracula did exist, you'd fill churches.

Yeah, because you'd go, man, I don't know.

I just want to go to the store at night.

So I got it.

Well, on the, you know, we're here on the subject of monsters.

And Kelly, like, this isn't the first of like the massive like monsters, the universal monsters that you worked on.

Frankenstein Alive, Alive.

Yeah.

I adore.

It is absolutely incredible.

But you took over and did the last issue and took over from the legendary Bernie Wrightson, the guy who co-created Swamp thing.

What was it like to work on something like that?

It was as big of an honor as you could get.

He called me, and as soon as he asked me, I knew bad things were going on in his life.

Yeah.

You know, and it was ill health, right?

He was kind of towards the end of his life.

Yeah.

He had reached a point where obviously his doctors had said they've done all they could do and he wanted it completed.

And

all I all he didn't, he had penciled very little.

Most of it was on little thumbnails about this big, almost a little bigger than a postage stamp where he would just kind of indicate what he want, but he would write it down.

He would write

what the quotes were.

And he gave, so, and he had all the stuff sent in his preparation for it.

But it was, like I said, a tremendous honor and terribly sad at the same time.

I,

you know, that same year, I do that and he passes.

So did Len Ween, who I'd been doing Swamp Thing with.

Yeah.

And,

you know, as an 11-year-old, when I first found their books, 11 or however old I was, those things had never figured.

I'd never figured that.

And the fact, like with Wrightson's Frankenstein,

like I said, he had a few beautiful penciled pages.

And I said, you know, I don't want to ink those.

I'll trace them, whatever.

And

because I wanted the originals to stay him.

Intact.

yes uh

and but they were gorgeous absolutely as good as you can imagine um

so

at that point you know

like I said it was very very sad to do but I'm glad I did it because it finished out his book and

and

I made a point that

so people would really know, I didn't let them publish it in grayscale, but in color scale.

So you could see all my workloads so you'd know it's okay.

Now it's me.

It's not him.

Just out of respect.

I didn't, I,

you know, I didn't, but

he was, he,

I don't know how he did it, but he did it.

And it's funny you should mention those small layouts.

That's, uh, I do that sometimes.

And I give advice like that.

It's so small.

I know, but I, I, I, a little bit bigger than that.

I give advice to young wannabes.

I say, do your layouts this big because if you can make it clear that size, then you're, then the rest is all just just yeah

you know he did and and uh even with and if something was uh more complex uh his compositions would yeah that's what you really writes and if anything was composition yeah so uh

and he would indicate where the light sources were so i just went with that um

but it was a that was a tough draw but i was very happy with it while doing it because he had passed at that point

and so there was nowhere to go for a question or something.

I was glad that they sent me a few things he had done

and it was finished.

So I could see how he pushed or pulled a line, how he applied washes and stuff.

And that was extremely instructive.

There's no way to do it.

I mean, it was that good.

And he drew so much with the brush.

It was...

Man, it was exhilarating to see that.

You could tell that wasn't drawn.

He just went and did it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You see that from his early early career, there's a bunch of large pieces that he had penciled and then started to ink and quit for whatever reason halfway through.

So you really get to see those stages and how much, as you said, yes, he's, he's rendering in the actual brush.

Yeah, it was, it was amazing, which takes a

mastery and a confidence that is supreme.

He could just sit down and draw.

He didn't really sketch.

I mean, I looked at some of this stuff and I go, there's no real, I know he, he would do preliminaries, but there's not a lot of sketching.

Pretty brief, yeah.

Yeah, he just draw.

Yeah, it was just all there.

Structural shapes, and that's about it.

Yeah,

I'm big on composition myself, but it was a clinic.

Yeah.

So is it when you're drawing like two different types of, like it seems like with Frankenstein, there's like more of a slow pace, but Dracula, far more manic.

But does that sort of change like the way that, like, do you, when you're drawing something more manic, do you draw faster or slightly different?

I do, I do.

There's days, too.

Yep.

There's days.

Uh,

I think you said he's he's very angry and he's very, or he's he's very emotional.

Dracula is

uh, the third one, he has to be more a little more reserved because he's in public now.

But well, and he's in an alien environment,

he doesn't know anything about when he lets himself go, it does work on me.

I do find myself, uh, you do draw faster.

Dracula, I, um,

I don't have any trouble figuring out what I want to do.

Yeah, I think a lot of it is that Matt's scripts are uh

pretty clear on what he wants, but he's also pretty clear on the intent.

So, um, and you just make him so sinister in every fucking shot.

Like, no matter what he's doing, I'm like, yeah, that guy looks sinister as shit.

Yeah, but it's good.

It's more of a, it's more of a hiss than a meh.

Like, you know, yeah, it's different.

Yep.

Well, he's in charge.

I always see see it like he's got all this ability.

He's got to be cautious in certain ways, but uh,

he's he's clearly the alpha of whatever, of whatever setting he's in.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, guys, thank y'all so much for joining us today.

This has been such a pleasure.

Yeah, real quick before we go, Marcus, we'd be remiss if we don't mention our project.

God damn.

Well, if it ever

comes out,

yeah, me, me, me and Matt worked on a project.

I, uh, we, uh, I wrote a

21-page, 22-page Sidden Nancy

retelling of the Siddh and Nancy story.

Matt drew it.

It was a goddamn absolute pleasure to work on.

And it all came about because my son, Brennan, turned me on to LastPod.

Yeah.

And from there, I discovered No Dogs.

Yeah.

And so I wrote them a note and I was like, you guys, your show, that was the soundtrack of my entire career.

And

Marcus came back and said, hey, well, I'm writing a story about that kind of music.

Would you be interested interested in drawing it?

You know?

I mean, it's, I,

yeah,

my God.

It was just so cool.

It was totally fun.

Yeah.

To work with.

Hey, Marcus, you're in a very small club, dude, because I've almost never worked with other writers.

I know.

I know.

It's absolutely incredible.

But get it.

You guys had Kevin Smith on a month or so ago or something like that.

Yeah.

Andrew Kevin's very first comic book story.

Really?

Yeah.

It was a Jay and Silent Bob short story called Walt Flanagan's Dog,

where

they're getting these misadventures and they end up like having a run-in with this little yappy dog.

So they get the dog stoned.

And then when they kind of come out of their daze, the dog's laying there with this enormous fucking heart on.

Yeah.

I read it.

I remember.

And I later designed the first Jay and Silent Bob action figures, and we included the dog as one of the accessories.

And we named him Tripod because he's standing on his front two legs and his dick.

And then his little hind legs are just kind of like waving around behind me.

But yeah, I mean, I hope, you know, once our next Z2 book comes out, we're still working on that right now when exactly that will come out.

But once that does come out, then yeah, it's, you know, it's, you know, me writing and Matt drawing the full Sid Nancy story and every bit.

And my son coloring.

Brendan color.

Yeah, and Brennan coloring as well.

Like, it's, it's so, and it's gory as hell.

It's just as gory as hell.

Yeah, Brennan said to me, Dad, this is one of the most extreme things you've ever done.

I was like, well,

I was very proud.

That actually makes me very proud that I wrote one of the most stream rocket radio.

I didn't even know this existed.

I can't wait to read it.

It must have been fun to draw all those needles.

Yeah.

It was, you know, I think.

A lot of needles and a lot of knives.

A lot of decrepit shit.

Yeah.

A lot of, you know, that scene was pretty gnarly, as Marcus accurately described, you know.

So it was.

Thank you.

I really, I can't wait for people to see it, but it'll be out at some point

when, you know, that whole thing gets released.

Oh, more carry-on.

And before we split, everybody, the campaign for the new one launches Wednesday, October 1st.

Go to Kickstarter, Dracula, Book 3, The Count.

Nice.

And you can still get books one and two.

You can still get the hardcovers of books one and two.

And people can get the hardcovers for books one and two from the Kickstarter?

Yes.

All right.

Okay.

Yep.

They'll be offered on this one as well.

Yep.

Yeah.

And are these for sale in bookstores and comic book stores?

Can they order them from their

Kickstarter is the only place to get the hardcovers.

Then Dark Horse Comics releases a trade paperback version via regular retail outlets about a month after the backers get their hardcover editions.

All right, cool.

So yeah, so yeah, you can.

And we have extra rewards.

We actually have some original art this time that's a collaboration between me and Kelly.

10 original pieces.

Cool.

So that's kickstarter.com slash.

Again, if you just search on Kickstarter for Dracula, Matt Wagner, Kelly Jones, you'll find it.

Got it.

Got it.

Yeah.

Or, of course, you know, ask your local comic book store to order it for you if you can.

Yeah, make sure you read this.

It's really cool.

It's like history meets Dracula.

I don't know.

It's just badass.

I love this.

Thanks, guys.

Yeah, I've done the book, volumes one and two.

Yeah, I loved so much and read through the whole thing in one night.

They were

at the point.

It's a ton of fun, as you can tell from the way we enthuse about it.

Well, thank y'all so much.

Thanks for having us, guys.

Thanks.

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