INTERVIEW: Dracula returns in Ricardo Delgado’s new illustrated novel
Image courtesy of Ricardo Delgado / Provided by Superfan Promotions with permission.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula continues to impress readers more than 120 years after its publication, and modern-day writers still look back at the classic text for inspiration. Take Ricardo Delgado, for instance. By day he’s a conceptual designer in Hollywood and known for his beautifully rendered Age of Reptiles graphic novels. Now he’s been bit by the Dracula bug (or is it a bat?) and will soon be releasing a fully illustrated adaptation called Dracula of Transylvania.
The project is being funded on Kickstarter, according to a press release, and tomorrow, March 25, is the final day to contribute money. Note to readers: This publication will surely be funded. As of press time, it was just shy of $60,000, against a $10,000 goal. Dracula is coming.
If Delgado’s name doesn’t ring a bell, there’s a good chance audiences have still seen his design concepts. He worked as a storyboard artist and character designer on such films as Apollo 13, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Incredibles, Men in Black and Wall-E, according to the Kickstarter page.
Dracula of Transylvania promises 20 illustrations and a reimagining of Stoker’s original tale, which tells the story of Count Dracula, Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker and Renfield. The cover image is a blood-soaked mouth of a bat, menacing in its bloody red horror. The yellow eyes of the animal seemingly pulsate as they stare at the reader. Some other industry honchos agree that Dracula of Transylvania is worth the read. Delgado has received quotes of support from Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), among others.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Delgado. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
How different is this Dracula tale from previous incarnations?
Well, this is a visual effects extravaganza put to paper and conceptualized by a Hollywood conceptual designer, with a helluva story to go along with it. See, it’s pretty expensive to write, design and fabricate much of the stuff in the original Stoker story, and the history of the rubber bat flapping around in those glorious old black and white monster movies is charming and nostalgic. And even some of the more recent vampire films like Fright Night or Interview With a Vampire either show the shapeshifting form of a vampire either briefly or not at all, and if it doesn’t change into a bat it ain’t a vampire in my book! Ha! Yet seriously I just wanted to take some of the imagery that I thought would be possible in this modern era and weave it into this classic story, then utilize my abilities as a conceptual designer to visualize it for the book, and I feel like I’ve come up with something new and cool.
Is there added pressure when using characters and a storyline that are well known to an audience?
Not when you have a clear vision in mind, and I had worked out the basic structure of the story pretty early on. I just knew I had a story that had really not been realized to this level of visualization, so with that I took this classic work of literature, this Victorian era ghost story, and added more layers, creating a supernatural, ghostly [world] around this malevolent and fearsome warlord of a vampire, the son of Satan. A true badass. No weeping about reincarnated lost loves here; this Dracula means business. He’s sacked every place from Venice to Constantinople and back, carrying all off that conquest back to his horrifying castle and ruling with an iron fist for centuries. With a premise like that, felt like I had a good recipe for success.
Why do you think this story still has an impact so many years after its initial release?
Because villains never grow old. They are always in fashion. There’s a reason that the character of the Joker portrayed onscreen has won two Academy Awards. Vader. Lector. Thanos. Uncompromising tyrants, and we the audience love to see them ravage, then watch their downfall. And Dracula is one of those classic villains. If you say the word Dracula everyone instantly knows you are talking about one of the great villains in book, film and television, if not the imagination. All I did was to refine and focus on that malevolence. In an effort to make the character more complex, in my opinion, some of the more recent adaptations have concentrated on his romantic side, but in this version I tried to make Dracula much more evil, much more uncompromising and much more terrifying.
How long have you been working on Dracula of Transylvania?
A few years now. Took some time to write, and I then had to design everything. Took a stretch, but it got done. The advantage I had was that I could write some of my concepts into the story, then design them like I was working on a studio film, but this was not for a movie, it was for me. It’s something I’m really proud of, the idea that I could own my stories and designs, and that after seeing some of my more interesting concepts for films cast aside for perhaps more innocuous versions. I was the one designing what would be drawn for my own story. That’s why this one’s special to me.
How important is Kickstarter to this project and other comic titles?
It’s important with regards [to] the flexibility of the publication. If you’re a regular Dracula fan, and you’d like to check this out, you can download for a reasonable $20. Or if you follow my stuff and are interested, you can buy a version that comes with an original drawing of mine, and that’s a cool thing for me as a kid who had to count his nickels and a fan who loves original artwork. Win/win.
When did you first get into vampires?
Oh man, this journey goes all the way back to my childhood and hearing my mom tell Costa Rican folk tales and watching the [Bela] Lugosi Dracula for the first time on TV. And so I devoured magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and comic books like Tomb of Dracula. And subsequently one of my uncles introduced me to the Christopher Lee Dracula from the Hammer films.
And back then, and this would be the early ’70s, there were a lot of books on movie monsters because of the release on TV a decade earlier of all the old Universal horror classics, so monsters were popular in a big way. There were these amazing plastic models of all the old monsters from a company called Aurora, and I dutifully collected as many of them as I could. Started with the Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Mummy, but Drac was the fourth kit I bought if I’m remembering correctly. I started with the Aurora kits that had glow-in-the-dark heads and hands.
And during that time my parents were making me take accordion lessons at a small music school at a corner strip mall where there was a liquor store that sold these bubble gum cards of all the Universal monster film publicity photos, so I had to count my pennies to buy them. The cards all had funny sayings printed over the images of the monsters like, ‘Hey, comb that hair!’ over a still of the Wolf Man for example. So my love for things that go bump in the night or in the movie theater or TV screen goes way, way back! Anyway, thanks for having me! Check out my book!
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Dracula of Transylvania, written and illustrated by Ricardo Delgado, is being funded on Kickstarter through Thursday, March 25. Click here for more information.
