Comics: Bram Stoker’s Dracula!

On 8 November we honor the birthday of Bram Stoker, the author of the immortal 1897 novel Dracula, which brought Dracula and humanity-stalking vampires to the popular imagination and lodged them there so firmly that “Dracula” and “vampire” have become easy synonyms.

Dracula has of course been packaged and re-packaged a million times, adapted for the screen and for the stage, pastiched to a fare-thee-well, transplanted to manga and comic books (including a long run as the property of Marvel Comics in Tomb of Dracula, an eminently satisfying 1970s title written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by the great Gene Colan), and right now on Bram Stoker Day, I’m thinking of one outstanding comics adaptation: the four-issue 1993 mini-series written by Roy Thomas and drawn by “Hellboy” creator (and clear Colan successor when it comes to using darkness and shadows in his work) Mike Mignola, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

As you can perhaps tell from the title, this mini-series was an adaptation of an adaptation: it tells in comic book form the version of Stoker’s story that we get in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie from that same year, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The movie is intensely weird. It’s visually fascinating from start to finish, self-consciously hammy in a style often reminiscent of Franco Zeffirelli’s opera productions for the Met; for journeys, we get superimposed maps, for supernatural surveillance we get superimposed eyes - that sort of thing. I think it’s easily the most interesting visual representation of Dracula ever done (although to judge from the critical drubbing it’s received, I’m alone in also ranking Gary Shore’s Dracula Untold – in theaters now, but don’t dawdle – near the top of that list), and Gary Oldman is superb as the title character.

Unfortunately, the movie’s casting almost completely falls apart once we step outside of Oldman’s dressing room (Kim Newman wrote a mighty enjoyable might-have-been story about what Coppola’s movie might have been like if it had had uniformly excellent casting). Keanu Reeves is dreadful (and not in the spine-tingling sense) as Jonathan Harker, and for once in his career, he’s not the worst actor in a movie: that dubious distinction here goes to an utterly embarrassing Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing. Hopkins quite visibly has no idea what movie he’s in, and since he’s in virtually the whole of it, that steadily distracts from the undeniable directorial flair Coppola was trying to impart.

Luckily, no bad acting can mar a comic book adaptation. True, Roy Thomas is forced to re-tell the peculiar quasi-hysterical, quasi-pornographic version of Dracula that Coppola did (the comics are heavily linked to the movie’s production budget, with trading cards and ‘backstage’ backup features), but it’s amazing what a difference his light but skillful touch can make to some of the more silly or banal parts of Coppola’s script (which was based on a screeenplay by James Hart, who did the brilliant screenplay for 2002′s movie adaptation of Tuck Everlasting).

And then there’s the artwork! I consider Mike Mignola to be one of the best comics creators alive today, someone who can virtually do no wrong at a drawing board. He saturates his four issues here with silky darknesses and perfectly-placed slants of light, and as in all his work (this Dracula work clearly presages some of the signature stuff he’d do on Hellboy very shortly afterwards), he exercises a very adept handling of pace: he’s a master of offsetting busy expositional sequences with a single brooding snapshot that often manages to convey more than all the preceeding words did. He does front and back covers and all the internal artwork for these four issues.

My own copies of these four issues are slowly falling apart, and unlike with, say old issues of The Avengers or The Justice League, I don’t hold out much hope of ever seeing them in a more durable format. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was made by Columbia Pictures, which has no more interest in the property, and it was adapted for comics by Topps Comics, which is defunct – it would probably take until Stoker’s 200th birthday just to chase down who actually owns these issues (if it were Mignola himself, surely he’d have long since convinced his current paymasters at Dark Horse Comics to reprint them? After all, Hellboy has been a bit of a hit, both in comics and at the movies).

But until their paper stock disintegrates, I can still enjoy re-reading this little gem – say, every year on the 8th of November!