The story of Dracula is one which has been (excuse the pun) resurrected many times since its initial publication. Unbeknownst to the general public, the full, and complete, version of Bram Stoker’s original story has never actually seen publication.

This is all about to change though, as this Wednesday will see the release of The Complete Dracula, by the writing team of Leah Moore and John Reppion, with painter Colton Worley. The Complete Dracula will be published as a five part comic book miniseries, of 32 pages each, through Dynamite Entertainment.

You might be asking yourself what they mean by the ‘Complete’ Dracula. Well, to find the answers to this question, and more. I decided to ask Leah Moore and John Reppion a few questions about this project, the resurgence of the popularity of vampire tales, and their writing careers in general.

Please, do join me, as I interrogate these pathetic mortals… Mwahaha… ahem!

Hi guys, thanks for agreeing to talk with Hypergeek about your upcoming Complete Dracula project. I’m a big fan of your work, and this new series looks like it is going to be really interesting. To start off, I was wondering if I could ask you:

• What was the genesis of this project. Was this something that you approached Dynamite with, or something that they came to you with?

John: Dynamite approached us with the idea of doing an adaptation of Dracula and around the same time they asked us if we’d be interested in doing a Sherlock Holmes series. Holmes got shelved while we worked on Dracula because it expanded into this massive project. It was a really rewarding experience though – we both learned a lot working on the series.

• This project is called “The Complete Dracula”. Could you explain why this is, to those who are unfamiliar with the story behind the original publication?

Leah: Well the main reason it is complete is that we have included Dracula’s guest, a short story published after Stokers Death which many believe to be an excised first chapter of Dracula the novel. Some people see it as an early run up at the book, before the diary format was decided on, but most people agree that it does relate to the novel directly, and we have put it where it seems to fit, at the beginning of the book. We did this mainly because its an unfamiliar beginning to the story. Most people who have never read the novel will be familiar with the scene where Jonathan arrives at the spooky castle and the door creaks open. We wanted to get away from that and make it unfamiliar so that by the time people get to the bit they know, its already part of the wider story. Hopefully this will make the whole thing hang together rather than just being scenes they recognise and scenes they don’t. The other reason why its complete is that we have adapted it using the chronology of the novel, the structure of the diaries and letters, and the pacing of the novel. All these elements were hard to translate into comic form, but I think it was worth it to make the comic really fell Stoker’s story. Hopefully we have done it justice.

• It is widely believed that “Dracula’s Guest” is actually the deleted first chapter from the original Dracula manuscript, which the publisher felt was superfluous to the story. However, some scholars, such as David J. Skal and Elizabeth Miller, disagree. What is your opinion of the tale, and what do you think that it adds to the overall narrative?

John: We’ve been lucky enough to be in contact with Professor Miller (she actually gave us a really nice quote for #1) and, having read her work, we were probably more nervous about what she thought of our inclusion of Dracula’s Guest than anyone else. The bottom line with the story seems to be that, assuming you accept that it is a tale written by Stoker (some people will go so far as to argue that it’s a hoax), you can place it in the chronology of the novel very easily. The story takes place on Walpurgis Nacht which is celebrated on the 30th of April – the first of Jonathan Harker’s diary entries in Dracula is on the 3rd of May. In Dracula’s Guest Harker encounters a huge wolf – chapter one of the novel once contained the line “I unconsciously put my hand to my throat which was still sore from the licking of the grey wolf’s file-like tongue” which was removed from the 1897 edition. These facts indicate that the events of Dracula’s Guest definitely take place prior to those of chapter one of the novel. Whether or not this means Dracula’s Guest is the first chapter of the Dracula is another matter. Stoker spent a long time writing and re-writing the book, going through several different drafts so it’s quite likely that Dracula’s Guest is actually part of and earlier run up at the story. It does however fit very nicely with the rest of the novel and we thought it offered a bit more of an insight into Harker’s character as well as a bit of a fresh start for readers overly familiar with the opening if the novel.

• Do you think that your adaptation can be fully appreciated without having read the original story? Also, for those that have read the original, will this extended version add new perspective to the tale?

Leah: I think so yes, hopefully it will be kind of a primer for the story, with people going on to read the novel afterwards. I hope lots of Stoker fans read it, as we have really gone out of our way to make it faithful to the original story but to make it flow a bit more smoothly than the novel. People have been talking with us about Dracula and one thing that crops up over and over is the way the long speeches really break up the flow of the action, so hopefully we will have ironed some of those wrinkles out for them.

• The original version of Dracula essentially consisted of of a collection of documents and diary entries, by Jonathan Harker and others. What were the major challenges with adapting this into a flowing narrative?

John: We’ve tried to preserve as much of the epistolary stuff as we can because we felt that was the key thing which most people threw out the window straight away when it came to adapting the book. The novel is often criticised for having too many main characters and whilst that might be true in places it is also one of its strengths because by coupling that with all these letters and diaries we are able to get a sense of all these different lives intersecting. All these quite subtle horrors and portents building into a whole which no single character can quite see. Our adaptation is, as you might well expect, pretty caption heavy but we haven’t just transferred Stoker’s text onto the page – we’ve re-written and distilled everything, trying to get things as succinct as we can while losing as little of the tale as possible. There is a fair bit of repetition in Stoker’s novel and that was really the main thing we tried to cut down a bit. That and the, at times, rather bumbling Victorian prose of some of the letters where people take half a page to say one thing simply because there is so much “that is to say that I should, if I might be allowed, venture to complete this sentence in rather more words than might be deemed absolutely necessary” type writing.

• As a follow up question: in addition to having to create a flowing narrative, you had to make this into five 32-page comic books, and make it appeal to a 21st century audience that have seen many different reiterations of the story. What do you think is going to make your version of the tale really stand out in people’s minds?

Leah: I think the characters have more of a chance to emerge, you see them doing things while their diary captions continue over the top, so you can get more of a feel for their lives, the differences between them. We have tried to put more expression and emotion into their faces than you necessarily get from the words in the book. Hopefully small things like that will make it really memorable as an adaptation.

• The Artwork provided by Colton Worley for this project is very photorealistic and Gothic . Is this something that you had a hand in?

John: Dynamite are really good at finding the right artist for a project. They always ask us what we think if they’re thinking of putting someone on a project but they’re usually spot on already. It took them a long time to find Colton because we all had a very specific idea of what kind of artist we’d need on the project. Colton’s a painter first and foremost and that makes his frame of reference very different to a lot of comic artists – he handles things another way and I think it really helps to keep the story fresh. You’re not seeing the same old shots that you might expect. And his artwork is beautiful of course, his attention to detail fantastic. Really, we couldn’t have wished for a better artist on this project.

• Would you say that writing this adaptation gave you any sort of new appreciation for the story of Dracula?

Leah: It did, yes. I had only a very vague idea of the story beforehand, not having actually read it, but after reading it four or five times or whatever it turned out to be by the end of the project, I really feel like I know what Stoker was trying to get across, and why he was trying to say it. It’s a book very much of its time, so all the dramatic monster action that got played up through the 50’s 60’s and 70’s in films, is balanced out by all this very contemporary detail about the world Stoker was familiar with, and about how knowing all that stuff means the hero wins the day in the end. Dracula is defeated by Victorian fastidiousness, by good organisational skills, by right headedness. It takes an American to introduce some swashbuckling and derring-do at the end, but the rest of the achievements are definitely more of an administrative sort!

• Since its original publication in 1897 the tale of Dracula has been retold and reinterpreted many times. It is clearly the most enduring and archetypal interpretation of the Vampire myth. What do you think gives this tale its enduring appeal, and makes it such a powerful and memorable story?

John: I think that the influence of F. W. Munarau’s 1922 silent masterpiece Nosferatu shouldn’t be underestimated in terms of keeping Dracula in the public consciousness. The film was a (thinly disguised) adaptation of the novel which as well as simplifying the story kind of brought it prematurely into the public domain. It began this cycle of reinterpreting the same basic story over and over but making it say something slightly different. It’s Nosferatu that introduces the idea of the vampire being killed by sunlight whereas in Dracula the count can go out for stroll in the noonday sun if he fancies it. The novel is also very modern in the sense that everything in it was bang up to date when it was published – phonographs, portable typewriters, blood transfusion equipment… all these things are so modern at the time as to verge on sci-fi. These are not Dickensian Victorians they are us – or at least the beginnings of us – modern gadget obsessives with disposable income gadding about on trains, going on holiday and so on. Once you get past the Gothic crust of the first part of the book set in Transylvania you soon realise that the world of the novel is very much our own. That makes it relevant and scary.

• The popularity of vampire stories seems to wax and wane every decade or so, much like the popularity of the zombie tale. Many are saying that 2009 is going to be a vampire packed year, is this something you expected when you began work on this project?

Leah: it wasn’t really, but then the Twilight hype started, and a few of our mates mentioned vamp related projects they were working on, and after an initial period of really wondering if our book was going to get lost in a sea of vampire books, we calmed down and just enjoyed it. There’s a rule of publishing which is that if there are already 40 books on a given subject, then there’s always going to be room for one more, and comics are no exception to this rule. The whole Zombie craze showed this perfectly, with critics and fans alike alternately complaining and rejoicing in the glut of zombie stories suddenly flooding the market. Yes it meant you had to dig harder to find the treasures, but then you have to anyway in comics, and sometimes even really bad zombie comics have some cool ideas in them. Hopefully The Complete Dracula will be one of the better vampire books about, but I’m looking forward to reading the rest too!

• This year will also see the publication of the Dracula spin-off, Harker, by Tony Lee, and the first ever direct sequel to Dracula, ‘Dracula: The Un-Dead’, by Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker. What are your thoughts on these sequels. have you read any advance material?

John: I’ve read about Dacre Stoker’s book but haven’t had the chance to see any advance stuff. I’d love to though, I’m very intrigued. Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Adrian went on to write some Holmes stories after his father so I suppose Dacre is kind of keeping up a tradition.

Tony Lee we know from cons and the net and I’ve seen some of Harker on his website as well as hearing bit and bobs direct from the man himself. Harker’s a clever idea because it takes place in the 7 year gap between the end of chapter 27 and the postscript of Dracula (written by Jonathan Harker). It’s kind of a DVD extra for the novel and with Tony writing it you can guarantee it’ll be good fun.

• To date, you guys have worked on several period, historical, and mythology based books, such as Albion, Sherlock Holmes, Battle for Atlantis, 800 Years of Haunted Liverpool. Is this a theme that you hope to pursue, or is there something different on the horizon for you?

Leah: I think that unless you are trying to write the most futuristic piece of original science fiction, using concepts no-one has ever used before, and a story which transcends all previous literary boundaries, then you are bound to be using some kind of historical or mythological template, even if its subconsciously. Writers use folk stories (which most of history actually is when you look at it closely) because they have big recognisable characters in them, big cartoon icons that we all recognise, and know what they represent in the story. There is a great book called Hero of 1000 faces, which plots the course of many of the archetypes we use in storytelling, and have used for thousands of years. Today we use bits of the stories in the Iliad, which was written 3000 year ago (at least) and that was written based on the much older traditional stories, dispersed orally around campfires. We may switch from doing Victorian stories to doing Sci Fi stories (I’d love to!) or superhero stories, or children’s books, but somewhere in there the same archetypes will crop up!

Thanks again for taking time out to do this interview guys, it is greatly appreciated.

Remember to come back to www.hypergeek.ca later, when I will be posting an advance review of The Complete Dracula #1.

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2. John Reppion’s Haunted Towns
3. On Adapting Alan Moore’s Light of Thy Countenance – an exclusive interview with Antony Johnston
4. Alan Moore Interviewed by EW.com?!?!?!?
5. Wired Interview With Alan Moore