Horror/Hero
When did you first hear about the classic monsters? Vampires, werewolves, undead creatures and the like? For me it wasn’t movies or comics. I first encountered them in video games.
As a kid I was as rabid a video game fan as I was a comic book fan. I rented NES video games from the local video stores as much as my parents allowed me, but I needed to know what I should be renting and how to beat the games. That’s where the magazine NINTENDO POWER comes in. I had a subscription that lasted years and was able to read about all the new games coming out in detailed walk-throughs. The detailed maps and characters descriptions lit up my imagination as much as the comics I read did, and indeed NINTENDO POWER included manga about METROID and THE LEGEND OF ZELDA, as well as its own comics strip featuring the character Nester.
Now with the news that NINTENDO POWER is ending I want to look back at some of the games that influenced me and the creation of DRACULA WORLD ORDER. Above is video of CASTLEVANIA III: DRACULA’S CURSE.
I know there’s been a billion Castlevania games, but my era of being a gamer covers the 8- and 16-bit years. The Castlevania games were my introduction to the idea of vampires, as you played as a member of the vampire-hunting Belmont clan. But you didn’t just fight vampires. Inside the spooky level designs you had ghosts, werewolves, and even Medusa coming after you. From an early age I associated the use of monsters with the use of all the monsters.
The third installment to the series was ambitious. You could take multiple paths and it had different endings. Also, you could switch characters mid-game. I remember reading that in NINTENDO POWER and being simply fascinated. I didn’t know then by the gears of team dynamics and how to write action for multiple characters was building in my head. Of the new characters were a pirate, a sorceress, and…Dracula’s son. Reading that a vampire, someone from Dracula’s own family, could be a good guy was another big revelation.
Flashforward some twenty years later. Plagued by concerns the eight-year-old me would want nothing to do with, I devise a story using the iconography of monsters to write about a world consumed by greed and corruption. The world would be ruled by Dracula, with Frankenstein taking up arms and leading a revolution. Except Marvel just did the Frankencastle series and DC is doing FRANKENSTEIN: AGENT OF S.H.A.D.E. (both fun comics). So do I chuck the idea? Wait, a minute. What about the old Castlevania game? Where you could play as Dracula’s son…
As I discuss the inspirations of DRACULA WORLD ORDER it was only a matter of time before I got to this one. Like so many influential works it’s not at the front of my mind when crafting ideas. Instead it’s something deep in the mental library, where my subconscious can rip out pages and piece them back together with hundreds of other texts and produce some strange tapestry. At the end of the process I get a better handle on the original work itself. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about TOMB OF DRACULA lately.
When the Marvel Essentials line got around to ToD it had already been built up for me by friends. Discovering the series in large black-and-white chunks brought both of its major assets to the fore: Gene Colan’s brilliantly moody artwork and Marv Wolfman’s ever-propulsive pulpy (which I always use as a compliment) plotting. What stands out the most to me now, and what I see as the influence on DWO, is that you have a long-running adventure where the antagonist and protagonists are given equally weight. Dracula must face the real consequence of immortality, that one is cursed with an ever-growing history where decisions can have epic consequences that last decades. He is plagued by Harker, Van Hesing, Drake, and Blade, the descendants of those he hurt (and in Drake’s case, his own descendant). Being undead means living with an extreme burden of history.
This symbiotic relationship, with both Dracula and the vampire hunters never rid of each other, led the book to explore all manners of scenarios and environments. A vampire community was built inside the Marvel universe. Other horror elements were also in play, such as a crossover with Jack Russell from WEREWOLF BY NIGHT and Dr. Sun, one of the characters that exemplifies this melding the horrific and superheroic.
I found in ToD the potential of stories about people who are bound to each other forever, and what happens when people both push against and give in to those boundaries in their own ways. I started the series mostly for the Gene Colan art, after all he draws the best women of all the early Marvel artists bar Romita, but I got so much more. I found an important lesson in crafting a wide-ranging narrative. It’s still a jolt to read.
For all of you interested in the digital version of DRACULA WORLD ORDER can get it for $1.99 over at comiXology, who have been a wonderful partner throughout the course of this book. It was important for me to have the book available digitally from day one.
The accessibility found in digital is vital for a small-press book like this one. It’s also important for me personally, as I feel there is great potential in both the form and audience expansion in digital. I am deeply interested in learning and considering all there is about the possibilities of digital comics. The audio of a few Comic-Con panels are up, and I highly recommend “Digital Comics Price Fight” for a…shall we say spirited debate. For me, it’s all about seeing where everyone’s coming from.
What’s everyone interested in the lead-up to Comic-Con? International banking scandals!
NPR’s report on the recent London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) manipulations is the type of story that remind me of why I created DRACULA WORLD ORDER in the first place. There were times when I worried the sequences of Dracula and Alexandru making their ways through the halls of power were too easy and simplistic. But when Brown University professor Mark Blyth describes some of these interests rate manipulations as “really just two guys in a room” I get…well, I can’t feel good that my story resonates as true when this is the truth we live in.
One of the concepts I use DWO to explore is that greed and the thirst for power is like the undying shark: always moving, never truly beholden to attempts to restrict it. What does that look like writ large but also on a personal level? That’s where a lot of the drama in the book comes from.
“World Destruction” by Time Zone (with John Lydon). When I was in college this song was on my mind a lot. Now, let’s admit this upfront, there may not be a song that sounds more 80’s than this. With Afrika Bambaataa and the former Johnny Rotten (pus Bill Laswell’s production) you have a song that is early hip-hop and and new wave smashed together without either sound making concession against the other. I still love it but I can see how someone could never get over how much of an artifact this is. That’s before you get to the lyrical content, which is a summation of the various crises the world was in when it seemed like the Cold War was at a breaking point.
Truth be told I couldn’t get over the era this song was coming from once I, rather selfishly, figured out how it related to me. This came out in 1984, when I was one-years-old. I couldn’t get over the fact the world was in such a fucked-up place by the time I had just arrived on the scene. It created a certain sense of angry hopelessness in me. I knew activists in college and could only think “any power structure you fight has had a decades-long head start, so what do you think you could accomplish?” I discovered the song from an episode of THE SOPRANOS, and it’s a Tony Soprano quote that hung over my whole outlook when I was in my early 20’s: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
Turns out delving into that sentiment through fiction gave me a chance to explore the very opposite way of seeing things. The feeling that everything is firmly and irrevocably fucked is half of the inspiration of DRACULA WORLD ORDER. I wanted to tell a story where everything went wrong and the whole game is rigged. But I knew that alone isn’t a story. To make DWO compelling and interesting I had to look towards hope. I had to create characters that believed they could change things, and entered alliances they never would have otherwise based on faith. The juice to DWO (and I’m seeing this more and more as I write further stories, of which I hope you will see soon) is the tension between hopelessness and hope. In my life now it’s something I bounce between almost everyday, and telling these stories is a part of the thinking process.
Of course, I may have just forgotten that Afrika Bambaataa is dresses like Dracula at the end of this video and the entire book is a long recovered memory.
DRACULA WORLD ORDER may have still happened if I had not discovered Ministry and the song “N.W.O.” off of PSLAM 69, but it probably would have had a different name.
Ministry’s middle period during the 90’s is a portrait of perfect intensity. Alien Jourgensen’s forceful and paranoid outlook (apparently the big hats is a fashion choice to distract any would-be assassins) crystallized into some of the loudest and most severe rock and roll ever recorded. The song is inspired by then president George H.W. Bush’s use of the term “new world order” during his speech to Congress about the first Gulf War (sampled in the song) and the conspiracy culture that grew in a post-Cold War world (see also THE X-FILES and elements of Bill Hicks’ comedy). I’m not one for conspiracies themselves, but I am interested in the feelings of loss and powerlessness that leads one to such a drastic outlook. What I found most fascianting is that Jourgensen phrases the relationship of power in romantic terms:
How to love without a trace of dissent
I’ll buy the torture cause you pay for the rent
and
I’m in love with this malicious intent
You’ve been taken but you don’t know it yet
It intimates all kinds of relationships of domination and submission, whether they be one ones of economics, romance, or drug use (a subject of many Jourgensen’s song…as well as his life). DRACULA WORLD ORDER sets out to use the vampire myth to explore all of that.
