While it hasn’t aged as well as some of the pre-war Universal Horror flicks, 1931’s Dracula remains an excellent entry in the the vampire canon, thanks to Bela Lugosi’s iconic performance as the Count. His hypnotic stare and unmistakable Hungarian accent set the benchmark for all other portrayals of Dracula, and it’s no wonder Legendary Entertainment have licensed his likeness for their new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s original novel.
Cover by El GaringAdapted by Robert Napton
Art by El Garing & Kerry Gammill
Lettering and Design by Richard Starkings & Tyler SmithFor the first time ever Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece is being united with the definitive screen Dracula, Bela Lugosi, in an all new graphic novel. In the late 19th century, Dracula, an ancient Transylvanian Vampire, moves to England to find fresh blood and spread his evil contagion. There he encounters two women, Lucy and Mina, who become the targets of his dark obsession. Aided by a group of brave men, Professor Van Helsing arrives on the scene and takes on the Vampire Prince in the ultimate battles between the forces of light and dark!
Before we begin, let’s be clear: Stoker’s Dracula isn’t a great book. It starts off incredibly strongly, with the reader trapped alongside Jonathan Harker in the Count’s castle, but fizzles out as it turns into a neverending series of pseudoscientific discussions about killing a vampire, and ends on an anticlimactic note. It’s unsurprising that so many film/TV versions diverge greatly from the source material, and unfortunate that this take is so slavishly faithful.
Make no mistake, this graphic novel feels exactly like reading the book, with long-winded dialogue often lifted straight from the Victorian prose, which slows us from getting to the parts we want to see, namely the evocative appearances from Lugosi’s Dracula. Halfway through, I felt I’d been effectively tricked into rereading Stoker’s potboiler, but that’s the catch-22 of this project: either you retread everything in the book, or you make it a new thing, and wind up only seeming like an expansion of Lugosi’s movie.
Artistically, because of its black-and-white color scheme and sheer wordiness, the book greatly resembles a ’70s horror comic, meaning Lugosi’s Dracula doesn’t lose his old school, Gothic charm after being brought into the modern comics landscape. There’s a lot of striking compositions, especially the great use of windows to create panels-within-panels that move the plodding story along, and Starkings and Smith’s lettering is particularly strong, giving everyone distinctive typefaces that also reflect the novel’s epistolary style.
The main attraction is, of course, seeing Lugosi’s Dracula doing what was impossible on the big screen 89 years ago, and it is undeniably cool seeing him baring fangs, drinking blood, or being rendered as a Wallachian warlord in flashback. Whether he appears old or young, his likeness is depicted incredibly accurately, which highlights another of the book’s flaws: it’s weird how realistic he looks, while the rest of the characters are (depending on their age) generically attractive, or cartoonish — I wouldn’t have been able to tell apart most of the main characters if it hadn’t been for their facial hair/hair tones.
The art also falls apart on closer inspection, due to its many perspective/foreshortening issues: for example, when we see Dracula crawling down the walls of his castle, the distance between his head and his legs is too small, something hastily obscured by his cape. Similarly, when the locals in Whitby discover one of the Count’s victims, a terrified child clutching his hunched grandmother has his head placed against her knee, when it should be near her shoulder, making him look like he’s been shrunk.
There were so many goofs, particularly involving the ship the Demeter, that I wanted to go over them with a red marker, and it didn’t surprise me to learn afterwards that Garing’s background was in fantasy art, not sequential storytelling — he and Gammill excel at the set pieces, but everything else ranges from fine to flawed, and it seems their talents would’ve been better suited to a new illustrated edition of the book.
Above all, the book never assuages my discomfort at Lugosi’s likeness being used this way: for the record, the book was made possible by his estate (including his son, Bela G. Lugosi), but I still don’t understand why you’d want to see his Dracula act out the scene from the novel where he cuts his own chest, and feeds Mina Harker his blood.
Perhaps Lugosi would’ve consented, but it feels exploitative knowing he didn’t, and it sets a potentially bad precedent — given the sexual overtones of the vampire genre, I must ask: what if a Gone With the Wind graphic novel used Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable’s likenesses for a sex scene? Or an adaptation of Stephen King’s IT depicted the child orgy scene with the cast of the movies? These are extreme examples, for sure, but it’s important to consider what we risk normalizing in the age of pornographic deepfakes.
How you feel about “Bram Stoker’s Dracula Starring Bela Lugosi” ultimately lies in how much you’d enjoy an unabridged adaptation of Stoker’s flawed genesis, because other than the (mostly great, but) glorified fan art of Lugosi’s Dracula, that’s all it is. If nothing else, it should inspire you to check out how previous comic book adaptations reworked the story, and ought to lead to “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Starring Boris Karloff,” which will hopefully be an improvement given it’s the superior book and film.
