Bram Stoker's Dracula!

With the exception of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein there is no more important horror work than Bram Stoker's Dracula. Dracula has inspired more movies than any single other work (including I think Tarzan of the Apes and Sherlock Holmes canon). But with all the attention given to the character of Dracula, the novel itself is often mutated when adapted to page or screen. Here Roy Thomas and Dick Giordano try to give us the story as it is presented by Stoker. 

To insure fidelity to Stoker's original work, Thomas purchased a couple of copies of the paperback version above, one for him and another for Giordano so they could literally be on the same page as they worked their way through the epic tale of the deadly vampire. 

 

That's a tricky business given the offbeat format that Stoker used to present the story. This is a collection reflections, diaries, and notes which together give the reader the thrust of the battle against Dracula. Thomas and Giordano attempt to adhere to that as much as they can, but the demands of a visual artform insists that they deviate. 

The project was begun under Roy's auspices as a somewhat independent venture in the pages of Dracula Lives. It made a few appearances in these issues but then Marvel fell off the monster train as quickly as they had gotten onto it. With the fad diminished produced chapters were stuck in later mags such as single issue of Legion of Monsters. After that all was quiet on the Transylvanian front. 

For more than a few decades this adaptation remained an unfinished classic. But after a few misfires the word came down from Marvel that they wanted to finish it. So, Roy and Dick fired up the engines again and produced the balance of the adaptation. They were limited to two hundred pages by the publisher, so the last chapters feel a wee bit more compressed but still it reads clearly and effectively. 

One sour note though is that Giordano's artwork had obviously and logically changed somewhat from his Bronze Age apogee. His later work still showed the magic but lacked some of the snap I associate with his best stuff. To a practiced eye it's relatively easy to see where the vintage stuff ends, and the newer material begins. But I'm not one to let the perfect be the envy of the good and while I'd have loved to see what Giordano in his prime might have done with the story, I'm still quite pleased with the actual adaptation. If you've never read it, I recommend it if you can locate a copy. It's yet one more nifty way to engage Stoker's classic. 

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