Dracula: An Interview with Matt Wagner & Kelley Jones

Host: Well, today we have not one, but two comic book legends with us. First, we have artist writer Matt Wagner, creator of such legendary characters as Grendel, Mage, and the author of one of my personal favorite series, Sandman Mystery Theater. We also have artist Kelly Jones, legendary for his work on Batman, and one of, if not the best artist, I'm sorry, Matt, to ever draw the Sandman.

Matt Wagner: Well, I'll take that one because it's true. But today, actually, that's how Kelly and I met. We both drew—he drew the bulk of "Seasons of the Mist," which is the most famous Sandman story arc. I drew one chapter in that. So we were together with a lot of the PR tour stuff, and that's how we first met.

Kelly Jones: Yeah, I mean, you co-created Dead Boy Detectives, you know?

Matt Wagner: Right, but I don't take much credit for that. Again, it was just that one issue. They weren't detectives yet. They were just a couple of ghosty high school kids.

Host: So you created the dead boy part.

Matt Wagner: Yeah, there you go. The dead boy part, not the detective part.

Host: I always like a good guy who creates dead boys. It's good for our show. I'm glad it's a good interview. And I will say, DC, the way they credit you is whoever drew it first, they get the credit.

Matt Wagner: Right. And I don't feel like I deserve it because I didn't do them as those characters, as the detectives. And yet when they had that one season of the show, I got a bit of money out of it. I was just like, okay. I didn't quit my job, but—

Host: Get that money, dude.

Matt Wagner: Yeah. I've created about a half dozen characters I had no idea I created. And he's right. I looked and I said, "I don't even know who this is." And they did it.

Host: Yeah, that's the thing—both of you have drawn and written so much over the years. Do you sometimes just forget things that you've done?

Matt Wagner: Sometimes, yeah. Details more than whole movements or anything like that. For instance, I know George R.R. Martin has a dude that helps him keep track of everything in Westeros because he's lost track of all that shit. But yeah, just little things here and there. For the most part, I can keep track of it pretty well.

Kelly Jones: Maybe you could finish that? We're busy on something else right now.

Host: Oh, before we get to your current project, I do have to bring up something that Kelly, you may have forgotten that you did way back in the day. I realized this morning when I was looking at the books you've done over the years that you were the very first artist to really have an effect on me as a child. The first comic book to really have a huge effect on me. Dino Riders.

Kelly Jones: Dino Riders.

Host: Yeah. I still have the toys.

Kelly Jones: Really? Yeah. I was under contract with Marvel then. Because I had started on the Micronauts, they simply assumed you do licensing. So I didn't get a say in it. One day I got this gigantic box of toys and I had no idea why. It said from Marvel. I had no idea what it was. Then they got a hold of me about a day or so later and said, "You have been assigned this. The scripts are being written." When you're under contract, you have no say. And that sucks ass. You don't get a say. When I was on Micronauts, though, it was licensed. You could invent stuff and make up things and they didn't care because the toys—they quit making these. It went through layers of people to approve one page. So I quit. But I didn't tell them I'm quitting. I just accepted a job from DC. I said, "Okay, whatever they do, they do." It wasn't worth pursuing. I can't get through this. One of the great moments of my career, besides working with Matt, was this went on for about two or three months. I drew a few and then I just couldn't deal with it anymore. But I went over to DC. In that time, I'm wondering, when are they going to call and say, "Where's the art?" I was completely unprofessional, but I was so angry because I kept saying, "Get me off, get me off. Take me off this thing." Then I find out they had canceled all the license books. Because of that, they owed me a lot of money. I had signed this contract. So I get this very large check, larger than I've gotten from anything they did. And I was working on Deadman. It was one of those—I made the right decision. I should have said I'm just quitting, but they wouldn't take no for an answer. Nobody wanted to do it. So we got this guy yoked in. I remember everyone saying, "God, you really changed." And I go, "No, I never got to be who I was." So it was one of those good things because Deadman turned everything around. But I owe it to Air Raiders and I owe it to Dino Riders. That's like getting an inheritance from a relative you didn't know existed.

Host: I always felt like Jed Clampett. I oiled.

Kelly Jones: But whether you really cared about it or not, that art truly disturbed me when I was a kid. The one professional part was I put everything I could into it. I realized this isn't the fan's fault. This is me and an editor and the company. So you always put your all into something, as ludicrous as it was. I'll be honest with you, I don't have bad feelings about it because I have an enormous amount of people who love those books. I get offers. I just put the original art in a box and said, "Who's going to want it?" Everybody wants it. It is one of the most requested things, those two licensed books. It was designed for kids, so I gotta remember what was I into as a kid. I would love it too, whatever those things were.

Host: It's one of the reasons—was Dino Riders gruesome? Did you make it gruesome?

Kelly Jones: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Host: That's what disturbed me because I was like six and it's like, "Oh, here's a guy—" I remember someone getting eaten by a dinosaur?

Kelly Jones: Yes, that was me. I finally do things because you do things to get fired.

Host: Seriously, your attempt to get fired changed my entire life.

Kelly Jones: That was my first introduction to gore, to horror, all kinds of stuff. The visual idea is great—weapons on dinosaurs and guys fighting. But they wouldn't go as far as they should, so I went as far as I could. I started doing a thing where I turn in everything really late so they had to approve it. So you got people getting eaten and killed and whatever. I got a lot of pushback on it. When you're doing stuff and trying to bring that extra whatever and you're getting shit on, you just say, "All right, fine, I'm out of here." I watch all my goofy friend artists pulling stunts all the time and still getting work. I thought, "This will be my one time. I'll change it and I'll do this stuff." What's good is it carried over to Deadman because I was so angry at that time. They said, "Well, you know, Neal Adams' Deadman..." I just said, "Now my version. And fire me then." I had a "fire me" point of my career.

Matt Wagner: That's like early in the Vertigo days. We weren't allowed to say the word "fuck." Even though it was supposedly adult aimed comics, we weren't allowed to say "fuck." So Neil Gaiman and I used to talk about how if you had something questionable you wanted to get through, you would throw a "fuck" or two into the script. Then that's all they would focus on. "You got to take that fuck out." "Everything else good?" "Yeah, fine."

Host: What are the dirty words for comics? Is there a list? Is there a George Carlin seven dirty words, or is it just "fuck"?

Matt Wagner: I'm sure "cunt" and "shit" and "piss" and all that. You're talking about mainstream comics. I've always done indie comics. I've done some mainstream stuff, but Jesus Christ, my stuff's foul.

Kelly Jones: You should read his scripts. In his scripts, he's really foul in describing what he wants. And I'm like going, "This is wonderful."

Matt Wagner: Matt finds 14th century curse words.

Kelly Jones: And I'm like, "That's just wonderful."

Host: Speaking of 14th century curse words, the reason we brought the two of you in today is to discuss your incredibly innovative new take on everyone's favorite Eastern European warlord, Dracula. Your take on Dracula is one of those ideas you can't believe you've never seen it before. You can't believe no one's ever done this. You're telling the story of Dracula from the perspective of Dracula.

Matt Wagner: Yeah.

Host: It's one of those ideas—I told my wife about it. She's like, "Oh my God, I've always wanted to hear that." She's a massive fan of the Bram Stoker book. But for some reason, it never occurred to people to just tell the story.

Matt Wagner: I've been stewing on it for more than a decade. I always wanted to try my hand at Dracula, but what do you do? It's been done to death. The original novel is described as epistolary, which means it's told in the form of letters, journals, news articles—there's no omniscient narrator. The one voice missing is Dracula. It works in the original novel because it makes him a sinister other, a presence. But after this long, we deserve to see his point of view. So I finally realized what we need to do is not adapt the novel. We need to tell everything else that the novel only hints at and doesn't tell. For instance, Book One is called "The Impaler." Twice in the original novel, Van Helsing mentions that when he was alive, Dracula attended something called the Scholomance, which is an Eastern European legend about this seminary for the dark arts that Satan himself hosts way up in the mountains. It's a seven-year tenure, and he takes 10 students every time. At the end of that, he keeps one of them. I thought, "How could they have done anything with this before?" This is such a deep well of story to be told. So that was our beginning. Then the second one is called "The Brides" because the three vampiric women make this indelible appearance in the novel, and they're only there for three pages. I was like, "We got to hear their story too. We got to hear how he got each one of them and who they were before they became his brides." The new one we're getting ready to launch in just a few days on Kickstarter. We do all these as Kickstarter campaigns. Any fan of the novel knows that once the action shifts from his castle in Transylvania to the streets of Victorian London, he's off stage for the rest of the novel. He's just this shadowy presence. You get some reports of things he's done, but nothing first person account. So we're showing you what he's doing because he's obviously doing something the whole time he's there. You get to see everything he does. It's been a blast. I keep writing these sequences thinking to myself, "Oh, Kelly's going to nail this. It's going to be so awesome." Then he turns in the art and it's better than I could have imagined it to be. I'm an artist too, so I've imagined quite a bit. It's such a beautiful synthesis between the two of us.

Host: I liked your reaction, Marcus, to when you were saying, "How did no one think of this?"

Kelly Jones: When Matt called me about, "Do you really want to work together?" because we'd known each other for so long and we'd always done this little two-step about working together. When he told me the idea, I reacted exactly the same way. He would just throw out the thing with the Scholomance, or he would just throw out what are the backstories of the brides. Then when he told me the third one wouldn't be an adaptation of what we know, but an exploration of what he was up to, I was reacting the same way. When that happens to you, I give Matt all the credit for this because he had to do all the research. It was his idea. In the 120 plus years of Dracula, no one's done this. It was completely interesting to me because when he first said Dracula, I said, "Well, what are we going to do with it?" Then he tells me this. In three minutes, I went from Dracula to "When do we start?"

Host: How much of this—I never knew about Satan and Dracula being buddies. I went back and reread it and he was right. "The devil teach him." Where did I miss that? I completely skimmed over that. How much of this is your own creative license, and how much comes straight from Stoker?

Matt Wagner: We are trying to stick religiously to the canon of the text. Yet so much of it is only vague hints. He mentions the Scholomance. He doesn't say what went on there. I took that opportunity to have a very special way for him to become a vampire. I figured he's the OG vampire. He's the name—I maintain he's the most famous literary character of all time. There's almost nowhere in the world you can say the name Dracula and people don't know who you're talking about.

Host: God's pretty big.

Matt Wagner: God's pretty big too, yeah. We're talking about fictional characters.

Host: God's pretty big.

Matt Wagner: But I thought, he's got a very special way to become a vampire. He can't just get bitten by another vampire. That's how every other vampire becomes a vampire. That's boring. So I had to come up with a very special way for him to become a vampire, which we see in Book One. As for how much is from the canon—Dracula isn't considered by a lot of literary scholars to be on the level of Dickens or Tolstoy. It's considered kind of a pulp thing. Yet it is one of the most dissected and annotated books in the English language ever. I have four different annotated versions. When I was writing this third one, I was working off a calendar. Since it's told in the form of letters and journals, they're all dated. So I had a calendar based upon the original text of what happens every day. I had to make it fit all that. This thing even had the sunrise and sunset times and the phases of the moon.

Host: That's incredible.

Matt Wagner: I had to make sure I passed the sniff test for all the Dracula scholars, yet I also had to make it so if you've never read the book, you would still be interested in the story as it unfolds. The third one was pretty intense. In a way, the third one is what we've been working for since the beginning. I just had to worry about how much breasts and blood to put in.

Host: Speaking of breasts and blood, I have a question for you, Kelly. Your horror stuff is just incredible. The way you draw pain and anguish is so evocative. But your gore is off the charts. What's your favorite piece of gore to draw?

Kelly Jones: This is like the James Lipton, "What's your favorite word?" I think my favorite gore, if I'm to be perfectly honest, are the little things. It's the small things that look painful. It can be a needle in a finger or something where I can do that because everyone can relate to that kind of pain. In the second book, there's a scene where the villagers storm the castle and Dracula drives them away by commanding lightning and then summoning rats and bats. There's a scene where a bat is clinging to a woman's face and plucking out her eyeball with its teeth. I remember thinking, "Oh, wow, that looks painful." Horror has totally different tropes and shtick than superhero. So I try to take advantage of that as much as I can. And Matt—it's all characterization. Matt will do a thing where the books are so entertaining to draw. He does sequences all through scenes and they all stitch together. You'll get a six to ten page sequence, maybe. Within that, it gives you something. You get to build that atmosphere for that one shot or that one moment. I think that's what makes people react even stronger to it than if I just drew an axe murder going on. It's this wonderful grotesqueness that Matt will write where it's unapologetic, non-biased. There it is. Then we move on. It isn't like you're getting off on it. It's like you go, "Oh, that's disgusting," or "That's frightening," or "That's horrible," or more importantly, "That's painful."

Matt Wagner: I had the reaction of "damn" quite a bit when I was reading.

Kelly Jones: Matt will do casual things. There's this corrupt politician in the second one and he gives Dracula this boy. Matt just has him casually carry off the boy, but they're discussing things the whole time. That really bothered me. But I thought, "Yeah, that's cool." At the same time, you're going, "Matt, it's like a psychological test. How disturbed are you?" Because you find yourself enjoying it and then saying, "Why am I enjoying this horrible mayhem going on?" But I do because everything's driven by character. So you feel it much, much more.

Matt Wagner: That's very important, especially with a contemporary vampire story. Vampire has been done to death. You have to do something to make people care, even just in passing, about what's happening to these characters.

Host: As far as the characterization of Dracula goes, once you started fleshing out this character that hasn't been fleshed out all that much over the years—the most might be Francis Ford Coppola giving him a romantic backstory. Which is not there in the book.

Matt Wagner: Not at all. Not even close. It was weird muscle armor.

Host: Was there anything you discovered about the character of Dracula that surprised you?

Matt Wagner: Well, you have to keep him as this unrepentant villain. There's nothing romantic about him. As I said with the Coppola movie, I have a love-hate relationship with it because I adore the cinema of it. His filmmaking is brilliant top to bottom. You can't argue with Tom Waits as Renfield.

Host: I don't like the casting much, top to bottom.

Matt Wagner: Oh, okay. I think the casting's kind of all bad. But the whole love story thing—once he gets to London and gets hooked up with Mina, he turns into this fop for the most part. There's the scene where she's been fooling around with him and then Jonathan gets rediscovered and she rushes to his side to marry him. They have this sequence of Dracula weeping copiously and smashing things. Dracula does not weep. Ever. I just had to maintain that he's not full of remorse. He doesn't have any remorse. There's one little bit of remorse he shows at one point in one of the books. But one thing I did find interesting is he has these three brides in Book Two. I had to be careful to not contemporize that. He would not think of them as equals at all. That modern-day concept of marriage and relationships is not there. Yet he never had any children with his living wives. These are the first things he's ever created as opposed to destroyed. So he feels some sense of responsibility for them. He feels a need to provide for them. He goes without eating himself to provide food for them, to provide blood for them. I wouldn't even call that a moment of humanity. It's almost more of a megalomaniacal sense: "I did this. I have to maintain this. These are my conquests. I can't let them go. I can't let them wither."

Kelly Jones: The characterization that I loved is why he chose them. That was the thing that got me. He can have anyone he wants, I guess. When I was reading this, I thought, "Oh, this is interesting." As he chooses each one of the girls, it's why he would. It's what interests him. So you get something from—Dracula never thinks he's evil. He never thinks, "Oh, I'm evil." He's doing what he does.

Matt Wagner: He knows he strikes terror, though. That's slightly different. But he did that as a warlord.

Kelly Jones: Right. So that to me was cool. When you get the other side of why he would be with each one of these girls, what is that? That's fascinating. It's horrific. And it's for three different reasons.

Matt Wagner: Yes. Because they're each three very distinct women.

Kelly Jones: That complexity of the brides as well as him. I always describe Matt as literary pulp. That's it. It's like, "Boy, you don't need that." But when you get it, you're saying, "How can you read this without that?" That's so much grist for me.

Matt Wagner: Another cool thing about the brides is once he gets each of them, one of the things that first attracted each of them to him, they kind of lose that when they catch his contagion. His gift destroys part of what he liked about them to begin with.

Kelly Jones: Yes.

Host: So Matt, you know how to do an antihero, but you absolutely know how to do that. What do you think we gain from hearing stories from the perspectives of villains, the direct perspective of a villain?

Matt Wagner: Because we each have a villain inside of us, baby. You recognize it. "There but for the grace of God go I." When somebody's behaving like an absolute shit, you think to those times in your life when you behaved like an absolute shit. It might not have been for the same reasons or in the same manner, but you know. There's a famous quote from Marcel Proust that he never heard of a crime committed by man that he didn't imagine himself fully capable of doing. That's what I love about antiheroes. They're so unrepentant. We have enough redemption stories. Fuck that.

Kelly Jones: It was crazy reading it. Dracula is a bad guy. He's the most notorious bad guy in the world. But I'm reading this thing and I'm like, "You know, I get it. I like it."

Host: Well, I can point you to another very famous example of that. Hannibal Lecter. He's horrible. And yet in all three "Silence of the Lambs," he's got to get out of there. I can't wait to see how he gets out of there. At the end, when he calls her and he's going to go eat that dude, you're like, "Yeah, get that. The dude needs it."

Kelly Jones: What I found interesting about it—I don't know if this was you, Kelly, or you, Matt. Vlad the Impaler. I'm not a huge Dracula nerd like everyone else in this room. But Vlad the Impaler, I always thought he used heads, not—

Matt Wagner: No, no, no. It's full bodies, baby. Up the poop shoot for the most part. That's historically accurate. The terribly excruciating thing about it is the weight of your body would slowly pull you down and dig its way up through your innards. Horrific way to die. Head on a pike? Everyone did head on a pike. That was standard. You're already dead when they put your head on a pike. The head's come off already. Impalement is a just awful, awful way to go.

Host: So this Dracula is a monstrous Dracula. This is not a romantic or a sexy vampire. Vampires have, over the years, kind of gone more towards that area, a bit softer, a bit sexier.

Matt Wagner: Sure, with Anne Rice and the Twilight shit.

Host: But then you look at something like Robert Eggers' version of Nosferatu, which really pulled it back to being this foul, disgusting creature. It was very cool. Only other time I've seen the beard and the mustache, other than you guys. Is that accurate to him?

Matt Wagner: That's accurate, yeah. He wears a mustache basically to hide his teeth. He can't retract the fangs like so many modern cinematic interpretations.

Host: What did you think of Asthmatic Nosferatu?

Matt Wagner: Oh, I loved it. Kelly and I have talked about this extensively. We've loved every version of that film. The Murnau version, the Herzog version, and the Eggers version. That said, that is not Dracula. Dracula is a different character. Dracula is not a decaying corpse. He's also much more courtly than that. The thick Romanian accent is not in the book at all. Harker comments to him twice, "Oh, you speak great English. You don't have any accent at all." The accent we're so familiar with comes from the Bela Lugosi film version. Lugosi was Romanian and spoke almost no English, so he had to learn his lines phonetically. That accent became the default Dracula accent. But again, not in the book.

Host: Besides Dracula, what other vampires do you love? And Nosferatu, of course.

Kelly Jones: I really like Count Yorga. I dig him quite a bit. There are little touches they did that I always liked. He knows all these languages. So when a deaf person comes up, he communicates in sign. I thought, "That's nice. That was pretty good." And he's sadistic in it.

Matt Wagner: There are a lot of good film versions. I've gone through a lot of film versions. First of all, both the book and the film of "Let the Right One In" are some of my favorite things ever. The best horror is always about something else other than the scares. "Rosemary's Baby" is about fear of pregnancy. "Let the Right One In" is about loneliness. It's about the loneliness of being a bullied 12-year-old boy or a 200-year-old vampire. That one is so poignant and so delicate at the same time as being scary as shit. I'm reading a new one right now by a new horror author—well, he's not that new—a guy I really like named Keith Rosin, who lives here in Portland. His brand new book is called "Coffin Moon." It's a vampire book. I'm about halfway through it. It's terrific.

Host: There's a Native American writer named Stephen Graham Jones. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He was my creative writing professor in college.

Matt Wagner: Oh, shit. Wow.

Host: Yeah. Amazing. All fucking world, man. I actually used to lend him comics when I was in college. I lent him my entire run of The Max.

Matt Wagner: Oh, cool.

Host: He once showed up to my house at 8 a.m. to return them on a Saturday after I was extraordinarily hungover.

Kelly Jones: How did he like Dino Riders?

Host: His most recent book is called "The Buffalo Hunter Hunter." It's about a Native American vampire. It's terrific. There was one a number of years ago called "Bite Marks." You remember that one, Kelly? I turned you on to that one.

Kelly Jones: Yeah, that was a good one. That one's rough, man. Some rough shit in it.

Host: At the risk of you guys talking shit about something that could make you upset—how do you feel about Blade?

Matt Wagner: Oh, I love Blade.

Host: You love Blade?

Host: Yeah, Blade's great. Blade's great. I'm totally remiss for not mentioning *Sinners*. Holy fucking shit. *Sinners* was incredible. *Sinners* is like *From Dusk Till Dawn* done right.

Matt Wagner: Classy *From Dusk Till Dawn*.

Host: Yeah, yeah. And Blade uses – one thing I want to point out is the trope that seems to run through almost every vampire myth is the whole "sunlight destroys a vampire." Again, not so in *Dracula*, not so in the book. I don't know how well you remember the Coppola movie. In the book, he can walk around during daylight hours. He's just not as powerful. He gets his full vampiric powers at night, and he has to sleep during the day on a bed of his own soil to fully recharge his powers. But if you recall the Coppola movie, when he first meets Mina, it's on the streets of London during broad daylight. But yeah, Blade is just full of those vampires bursting into dust and flame. Just awesome. I love it. Like a lot of franchises, though, it went downhill fast. Number one and two were great.

Kelly Jones: One of my favorite things to see is to watch a vampire explode. That's going to make me happy every single time if a vampire explodes for whatever reason. Great scene of that in *Let the Right One In* where the one guy's girlfriend gets bitten and she's turning, and she asks the hospital attendant to open the window because she knows that will destroy her. And she just bursts into this ball of flame that's licking the ceiling immediately.

Host: You know it's not good, but I love it anyway.

Kelly Jones: There's a lot of those vampires. *John Carpenter's Vampires*.

Host: Yeah, I'm not nuts about that. It's a bad movie. I know it's a bad movie, but I'll put it on any time.

Matt Wagner: I can appreciate that, Ed. I totally appreciate that.

Host: Being a Carpenter fan, we just got a quote, a blurb from Carpenter, an endorsement.

Matt Wagner: Really?

Host: Yeah.

Matt Wagner: Well, I take it back then. Thank Mr. Jones for that one.

Host: No, I mean, the blurbs that y'all have been getting for this book, I'm not alone in saying that this book is incredible. The reaction that y'all have got from this, like, how does it feel to have so many people just say, "Holy shit, this is the Dracula story that I've been waiting to hear, to read my entire life"?

Matt Wagner: Well, it makes me feel like, wow, we got it right. Because, of course, you never know going into it. You might hit a lot of resistance. But from the very beginning, as Kelly said, when I first started outlining to him what I wanted to do and I was seeing his reaction, I was like, yeah, we're really on to something here. It's working. I couldn't tell anybody. I would read this to him. He would tell me this. I didn't want it out there. And so I was alone with this for a while.

Kelly Jones: Yeah, we sat on it for a while. And it was driving me crazy because I knew how I was reacting. So when I started hearing other people when they would read the first one or whatever and react the exact same way, then I knew. I always knew Matt was on to something, because I know this stuff pretty well and I felt stupid when he was telling me this stuff. I thought, why didn't I think of this? And then I was very entertained when I would read it. How do you sustain this idea? When he said in the first one, which is a great way he got there, he really doesn't become a vampire till the very end.

Matt Wagner: Yeah. It's sustained interest.

Kelly Jones: At the same time, we had to make him very recognizable as Dracula. In lesser hands, what Matt wrote would be dreadfully boring. And I always told him, I said, this would be great if someone drew it in stick figures, because it's just all there. And it's the ideas. I'm very big on ideas. I think ideas, if you've got those, that really is compelling to people. And Matt had ideas everywhere on this. From just how you do a good comic book to what you're going to say to bringing a new light on something. All of it was working. All of it. And it is all I can do. People will say to me, how do you go about sustaining that energy? It's very easy. He writes all these scenes, which for me I like because people when they like something, they'll describe something they like. I found most this happens to me the most with what Matt's done. They'll just go on and on about, "and this scene, and this scene, and this scene." And I'm going, well, that's what I thought. That's why I'm not... A lot of stuff too will just pop up. I don't pre-plan anything. I don't do thumbnails. I don't do anything. I work very emotionally. So I want to feel it that day. I'll read Matt's stuff over a lot. And sometimes I'll get an idea, but most of the time that idea is rejected by the time I get to actually drawing it. And then I always think, well, how can I really emphasize what Matt's doing here? And that's where it comes together really well, because I don't know that a lot of this stuff's going to happen. Some stuff I think is going to be really gory isn't, and other stuff becomes very gory, and I didn't think of it that way. But that's the pleasure of working with someone who's figured it out. There's no plot holes with Matt. There's no "I don't understand this." So at that point, you kind of bend the knee because you realize somebody put a lot of effort, thinking, research to scare the hell out of you. And it works. He does do that. I'll read it and go, "Jesus Christ."

Host: Even down to, fellas, you have a copy of the first volume sitting in front of you there. The logo we use is the same logo that was on the very first 1897 hardcover edition.

Matt Wagner: Hell yeah. That's great. Keeping it real.

Host: Now, if this is too much of a spoiler for the first book, please tell us to not put it in the episode. But I'm curious. Why was Satan a boy?

Matt Wagner: Just because it's the opposite of what you expect. And he looks... I mean, you get to see what he really is later. And he presents himself differently to everybody. There's that one scene where all the various scholars, depending on their nationality, are describing how they see him. And it's all basically derivative of their own mythologies.

Host: So what was it about the Eastern European mythology, like Dracula's mythology, that made him see Satan as a little boy?

Matt Wagner: Oh, it's Catholic based. And I'm sure in my mind, it was some little boy that he had impaled. Some peasant boy.

Kelly Jones: That was one of the things. And Dracula's response is, "I don't give a shit." Like, you're trying to freak me out? Fuck you. I was there. I saw that thing go up his asshole.

Matt Wagner: Right. Because right up top when you see the impaled people when he's still Vlad and he's still in charge, you see a little boy.

Kelly Jones: That's what I thought when I read it. That's why I put the little boy there. I didn't think it would be that, but I thought that's what Matt was thinking. This is somebody, or a presentation of somebody he did this to.

Matt Wagner: This is not endemic to that time period. Look at the casualties in Gaza. It's indiscriminate of age and class and sex and everything. War destroys everything. Any war. And considering that Vlad doesn't see himself as a sick guy, but using that as a psychological terror weapon, which worked. In real life, it worked. He's not even thinking about, "Geez, I really shouldn't have done that." He's thinking, "Man, those shrieks will keep the Turks away."

Host: And then in book two, we had a sequence where... In the actual novel, you only ever see him prey on women. You get the feeling that sure, he bites guys, but you only ever see him prey on women. And if you go down the Anne Rice route, all the vampires are ambisexual. They have sex with men and women. You live that long and it doesn't matter to you. Party time. So I had to figure out a reason why he only preys on women. And I took as inspiration certain predators. We've all seen a cat play with a mouse, right? And I know from you guys, the sequence of orcas you did with SeaWorld, and Ed, you were the host on that one.

Kelly Jones: Orcas can toss a seal around in the air for an hour. Why do they do this? Certain animal behaviorists will say, "Well, they're honing their skills." And I'm like, really? They already caught the thing. How's this honing the skills?

Host: And my thought was always, maybe this just makes it taste better. It tenderizes. Maybe somehow the fear juices are marinating that meat and it just tastes better. So Dracula goes on and on about how women just taste better. He says there's a certain assertive tang in the gore of males.

Kelly Jones: That's the thing I love. Stuff I've not thought of. And when he said that, I went, that really helps me draw this. Because then I see him being more consumptive rather than seductive. He's culinary about it.

Matt Wagner: If I had to eat a person, I'd choose a woman.

Host: There you go. When I remember telling my wife about that, she goes, "Yeah, that's exactly what would..." I mean, there's so many things Matt does, I always run it by her and I'll say, "Well, okay, what would you react to?" And she goes, "No, that's good. That's good." And it's all horrible things happening to women. So she'll go, "No, that's scary." If it passes your artist's wife test, you're good. So I'll always say, "Well, would this bug you?" And she goes, "No, that's really good. Don't change that." And I'm like, okay, that's good.

Matt Wagner: In book three, when he's in London, I have him describe the taste of everybody he bites. In most cases, it has to do with their social status. I remember one is, "She tasted of liniment and broken dreams." And it varies from whether it's a man or a woman or high class or low class.

Host: So when you're writing something like this, something like Dracula that's been done so many times, and I'm sure you've seen basically every Dracula adaptation out there and probably read quite a few of them as well, how do you keep the ideas of other people out of your head?

Matt Wagner: That's tough. And I do stay away from certain things. Like when we started this, I deliberately did not go check out Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's long-running classic run at Marvel Comics on Dracula, which is where Blade was first introduced. That was so much material, I thought, well, I don't want to cross over with something they might have done consciously. If I do it accidentally, fine, but I deliberately stayed away from those.

Kelly Jones: I love reading those too. So when I got on this, I just took all those books I used to and put them away. When I was doing Batman, I wouldn't read Batman comics from the artists I love. I went on a 10-year not reading it, because you don't want to be influenced by it or take the same ground, consciously or unconsciously.

Host: Speaking across the material, I don't know if you guys know this or not. Have either of you ever seen the Dan Curtis-directed 70s TV movie starring Jack Palance? Of Dracula.

Matt Wagner: No.

Host: Did not know that existed. It's adapted by Richard Matheson, the legendary Richard Matheson. *Twilight Zone* Richard Matheson. It's pretty darn good. I think it's excellent. It's where they first introduced the theory that Mina is the reincarnation of his long-lost love. But that was on when they were developing *Tomb of Dracula*. And so artist Gene Colan based his Dracula on Jack Palance. And he did a great job of it. He gave him a little mustache. But if you go and look, it's got this broad face and a broad mouth like Jack Palance. And the eyes kind of beady. And he's mean as shit in that, too.

Matt Wagner: He is mean as shit.

Host: Is there any Dracula lore where you're like, "Fuck it. That's stupid"? Like, I didn't see anything about garlic in the first book or anything like that.

Matt Wagner: We get to garlic, yeah. I mean, he's so powerful. I have it that most of it doesn't affect him all that much. It's also the whole thing with the Scholomance. First of all, in the novel, we don't see many other vampires. And they're all women. But he exhibits powers way beyond what the other ones have. You can see them, mainly what they do is they can turn into a mist and materialize here and there. But you never see them command the weather or transform into animals or command animals. My approach was that's all necromancy that he learned at the Scholomance. That's outside of vampiric powers. We do bring in garlic in the third one. Crosses and stuff though. There's a famous, actually a pretty good movie, but it has a silly ending. It's Hammer's second film called *Brides of Dracula*. Did not star Christopher Lee. Christopher Lee didn't come back for that one. And it's got a lot of good stuff in it. But at the very end, they turn a windmill so that the arms of the windmill are a cross. And he gets fucked up by the cross. Now, that doesn't make any sense because there are crosses in architecture everywhere you look. The ticket fences are full of crosses. He wouldn't be able to go anywhere. So my approach is it has to be wielded with a faith behind it, an active faith, not a cursory or a casual faith, to have an effect on him.

Host: So if you're an atheist and show Dracula a cross, it don't mean shit. Ain't going to do shit, buddy.

Matt Wagner: Yep.

Host: Hell yeah. I think if Dracula did exist, you'd fill churches. Because you'd go, "Man, I don't know. I just want to go to the store at night, so I got it."

Host: Well, we're here on the subject of monsters. And Kelly, this isn't the first of the massive Universal monsters that you worked on, like *Frankenstein Alive, Alive!* I adore it. It is absolutely incredible. You took over and did the last issue and took over from the legendary Bernie Wrightson, the guy who co-created Swamp Thing. What was it like to work on something like that?

Kelly Jones: It was as big of an honor as you could get. He called me, and as soon as he asked me, I knew bad things were going on in his life. It was ill health. He was kind of towards the end of his life. He'd reached a point where obviously his doctors had said they've done all they could do, and he wanted it completed. He had penciled very little. Most of it was on little thumbnails about this big, almost a little bigger than a postage stamp, where he would just kind of indicate what he wanted. But he would write down the quotes. And he had all the stuff sent in his preparation for it. But it was a tremendous honor and terribly sad at the same time. That same year, I do that and he passes, so did Len Wein, who I'd been doing Swamp Thing with. As an 11-year-old when I first found their books, those things had never figured. With Wrightson's *Frankenstein*, he had a few beautiful penciled pages, and I said I don't want to ink those. I'll trace them whatever, because I wanted the originals to stay him intact. They were gorgeous, absolutely as good as you can imagine. So at that point, it was very sad to do, but I'm glad I did it because it finished out his book. And I made a point so people would really know I didn't let them publish it in grayscale but in color scale so you could see all my work lines, so you'd know, "Okay, it's me, it's not him." Just out of respect. I don't know how he did it, but he did it.

Host: It's funny you should mention those small layouts. I do that sometimes. I give advice to young wannabes: do your layouts this big because if you can make it clear that size, then the rest is all just dressing.

Kelly Jones: He did. And even with something more complex, his compositions would... He would indicate where the light sources were, so I just went with that. But it was a tough draw. I was very happy with it while doing it because he had passed at that point. And so there was nowhere to go for a question or something. I was glad that they sent me a few things he had done and it was finished. So I could see how he pushed or pulled a line, how he applied washes and stuff. That was extremely instructive. There's no way to do it. I mean, it was that good. And he drew so much with the brush. It was exhilarating to see that. You could tell that wasn't drawn. He just went and did it. You see that from his early career. There's a bunch of large pieces that he had penciled and then started to ink and quit for whatever reason halfway through. So you really get to see those stages and how much, as you said, he's rendering in the actual brush. It was amazing. Which takes a mastery and a confidence that is supreme. He could just sit down and draw. I looked at some of this stuff and I go, there's no real... I know he would do preliminaries, but there's not a lot of sketching. Pretty brief. You just draw. It was just all there. Structural shapes. And that's about it. I'm big on composition myself, but it was a clinic.

Host: So is that when you're drawing two different types? It seems like with *Frankenstein*, there's more of a slow pace, but *Dracula* is far more manic. Does that change the way you draw? When you're drawing something more manic, do you draw faster or slower?

Kelly Jones: I do. There's days.

Matt Wagner: I do too. There's days.

Kelly Jones: I think you said he's very angry and he's very emotional. Dracula in the third one has to be a little more reserved because he's in public now, but he's in an alien environment. He doesn't know anything about it. But when he lets himself go, it does work on me. I do find myself drawing faster. *Dracula*, I don't have any trouble figuring out what I want to do. I think a lot of it is that Matt's scripts are pretty clear on what he wants, but he's also pretty clear on the intent.

Host: And you just make him so sinister in every shot. No matter what he's doing, that guy looks sinister as shit.

Kelly Jones: It's more of a hiss than a... It's different. He's in charge. I always see it like he's got all this ability. He's got to be cautious in certain ways, but he's clearly the alpha of whatever setting he's in.

Host: Well, guys, thank y'all so much for joining us today. This has been such a pleasure.

Matt Wagner: Yeah.

Host: Real quick before we go, Marcus, we'd be remiss if we don't mention our project.

Kelly Jones: Goddamn. Well, if it ever comes out.

Host: Me and Matt worked on a project. I wrote a 21-page, 22-page Sid and Nancy retelling of the Sid and Nancy story. Matt drew it. It was an absolute pleasure to work on. And it all came about because my son Brennan turned me on to Last Pod. And from there, I discovered No Dogs. So I wrote them a note and I was like, "You guys, your show was the soundtrack of my entire career." And Marcus came back and said, "Hey, well, I'm writing a story about that kind of music. Would you be interested in drawing it?" It was just so cool. It was totally fun.

Matt Wagner: And Marcus, you're in a very small club, dude, because I've almost never worked with other writers.

Kelly Jones: I know. It's absolutely incredible. But yes, thank you so much. Kevin Smith a month or so ago, something like that, right?

Host: Yeah. I drew Kevin's very first comic book story. It was a Jay and Silent Bob short story called "Walt Flanagan's Dog" where they get into these misadventures and they end up having a run-in with this little yappy dog. So they get the dog stoned, and then when they come out of their daze, the dog's laying there with this enormous fucking heart on.

Kelly Jones: I read it. I remember. And I later designed the first Jay and Silent Bob action figures, and we included the dog as one of the accessories. And we named him Tripod because he's standing on his front two legs and his dick, and his little hind legs are just kind of waving around behind him.

Host: But yeah, hopefully once our next Z2 book comes out, we're still working on that right now. Once that does come out, it's me writing and Matt drawing the full Sid and Nancy story, every bit. And my son Brennan coloring. And it's gory as hell. It's just as gory as the story is.

Matt Wagner: This is one of the most extreme things you've ever done.

Host: I was very proud. That actually makes me very proud that I wrote one of the most extreme things I've ever done. I didn't even know this existed. I can't wait to read it.

Kelly Jones: It must have been fun to draw all those needles.

Matt Wagner: Yeah. A lot of needles and a lot of knives, a lot of decrepit shit. That scene was pretty gnarly as Marcus accurately described.

Host: Thank you. I really can't wait for people to see it, but it'll be out at some point when that whole thing gets released.

Matt Wagner: More gory.

Host: And before we split everybody, the campaign for the new one launches Wednesday, October 1st. Go to Kickstarter, *Dracula Book Three: The Count*. And you can still get books one and two. You can still get the hardcovers of books one and two.

Matt Wagner: People can get the hardcovers for books one and two from the Kickstarter?

Host: Yes. They'll be offered on this one as well.

Matt Wagner: And are these for sale in bookstores and comic bookstores? Can they order them from their...

Host: The Kickstarter is the only place to get the hardcovers. Then Dark Horse Comics releases the trade paperback version via regular retail outlets about a month after the backers get their hardcover editions.

Matt Wagner: So you can either get... We actually have some original art this time. That's a collaboration between me and Kelly. Ten original pieces.

Host: Cool. So that's kickstarter.com. Again, if you just search on Kickstarter for "Dracula, Matt Wagner, Kelly Jones," you'll find it. Or, of course, ask your local comic book store to order for you if you can. Make sure you read this. It's really cool. It's like history meets Dracula. It's just badass. I love it.

Matt Wagner: Thanks, guys.

Kelly Jones: I did the volumes one and two. I love so much and read through the whole things in one night.

Host: They're a lot of work. It's a ton of fun, as you can tell from the way we enthuse about it.

Matt Wagner: Well, thank y'all so much. Thanks for having us, guys.

Kelly Jones: Thanks.