Dracula is so hot right now, with this week’s release of Universal Monsters: Dracula #1 from Skybound. And now, another team is taking a stab at fiction’s most famous monster… Matt Wagner and Kelley Jones are launching a Kickstarter for Dracula Volume 1: The Impaler. The volume is the kick-off of a brand-new graphic novel series aiming to tell the secret history of Vlad.
Naturally, it was successfully funded in a matter of seconds.
To be fair, the asking price was $666. That’s a glib amount of money that almost definitely doesn’t pay for the work of the two creators. Wagner is a top-tier creator known for Grendel. Jones is known for Sandman: Seasons of the Mist among other books. But as of this writing, less than 30 minutes after launch, the Kickstarter is already well over $17,000.
“Matt Wagner has been a great friend of mine for over thirty years and I always regretted that we never got to collaborate on something together and told him that many times,” Jones said via a press release provided to Comic Book Club. “I love Dracula from the novel on down and, after our first conversations about this project, I knew that Matt would tell the tale no one had told before and no one would ever forget. Being able to bring this to life has been the most rewarding achievement in my career and I think it shows.”
Unlike Universal Monsters, which focuses on the events of the novel and Universal movies, this 100+ page graphic novel will take the future vampire back to the beginning.
“The first graphic novel explores what led Dracula to seek out Satan’s tutelage and how he became the lord of the undead,” Wagner explained. “This project is a real labor of love for Kelley and I. We are enormous fans of Dracula and the many interpretations of his mythic story. Our version of Dracula is bloody, sexy, and monstrous; this is very much a horror story, with deep roots in Stoker’s novel. But this isn’t yet another retelling of the novel in comics form. We’re bringing you the never-before told stories behind the story…the sinister tales hidden in the shadows of the original novel.”
Get a first look at the insides and outsides of the book here, which is a weird way of saying “interior pages” and “covers.” But we’re in the bloody Dracula mode, so let’s roll with it.
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