Horror/Hero
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.
I have mentioned many films that are an influence on DRACULA WORLD ORDER. One that is a major influence, to the point where I am surprised people haven’t mentioned it to me, is John Carpenter’s THEY LIVE.
Carpenter is a huge influence overall, and the DNA for many of his films can be found in DWO (I mentioned THE THING in the backmatter, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and PRINCE OF DARKNESS are big influences too). THEY LIVE had a particular impact because it showed me how not just certain political issues, but an entire cultural malaise can be used as fuel for a storyline. THEY LIVE is still vital today because the paranoid feeling it engenders isn’t based off on any particular dated talking point. The film is from 1988, but the script doesn’t use buzzwords like “trickle-down economics”. Instead, fear is built off of the universally relatable feeling that big decisions are being made, and that you have no access to them even though your life is deeply affected. That story resonates in a political sense, but it also on a deeper personal level going back to our feelings towards our parents and authority figures in school. This film exists where the personal meets the political, which is an area I like exploring in DWO.
One thing that amazes me about the film every time I see it is that it speaks for the proletariat not just in story, but in its overall approach. The film feels blue-collar in every sense, down to Roddy Piper’s plain (but heightened when it needs to be) approach to acting (the best performance by a wrestler, sorry NO HOLDS BARRED fans). Downtown Los Angeles, a part of the city oft-forgotten in both film and actual city life, is shown warts and all with Carpenter’s precise, no-muss, film style.
I was heartened to hear that Shout! Factory’s new horror brand Scream Factory has a special edition of THEY LIVE coming soon (but first, I have to pick-up that version of HALLOWEEN III with the Tom Atkins commentary!). Perhaps it will include the Carpenter/Piper commentary only available in European DVDs, which of course is totally impossible to find in our day and age. But special edition or not, THEY LIVE will be around forever due to its bravery in staring down a feeling of paranoia and disenfranchisement that never truly leaves our cultural soul.
(The above trailer for LIFEFORCE features NSFW material)
I mentioned LIFEFORCE in the text-piece for DRACULA WORLD ORDER, and I worry that many people may not be familiar with the film. I do recommend it. Not because it’s a great film, but because it’s a great experience.
Based on Colin Wilson’s THE SPACE VAMPIRES, the film is a hodgepodge of vampire, alien, and Lovecraftian cosmic mythos. The first act of the film is space horror akin to Ridley Scott’s ALIEN (Dan O’Bannon, the co-writer of ALIEN, is the screenwriter for this film). When the film lands on Earth, and Great Britain in particular, there’s a paranoid relationship with the unknown that feels thematically similar to Britain’s Quatermass series. The third act culminates in scenes that combines tropes of zombies (O’Banon is also the writer and director of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD), aliens, and vampires. It’s the vampire myth, here in one of its most sexually potent realizations (Mathilda May must hold a record for on-screen nudity) that strings along such disparate concepts. At the core of the film is the obsession between May’s exotic alien vampire and Steve Railsback button-downed astronaut, an obsession that seems to reveal many of the supporting players’ personal kinks. This is not the smoothest road story-wise but for those looking for juicy ideas to contemplate concerning what horror fiction can do, LIFEFORCE has a lot to offer. Tobe Hooper directs the film with great vigor, and it’s clearly one of the biggest productions from legendary cult film studio Cannon Films (THE APPLE, DELTA FORCE, the MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE film, and much more).
It’s rare to find a film that is both a positive inspiration and a cautionary tale, but I have one in LIFEFORCE. It’s ambition and versatile use of vampires was very much on my mind when crafting DWO. I also saw that traveling between big, heady concepts is delicate work. I do admire LIFEFORCE for striving from one batshit idea to the next with such confidence. That’s half the game. Including explanations for the audience that is in itself interesting and satisfying is the other half. LIFEFORCE isn’t too interested in that.
As Leonard Maltin says in his review “you got to meet [LIFEFORCE] halfway.” If you do you are in for a film that arrives from a different world, where summer tentpoles are interested in strange and disturbing subject matters as much as special effects.
I had a great conversation with Brett about the comic, that then veered off into topics like Kickstarter, how people’s expectations and tastes are changing. Enjoy.
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.
