The Project

My goal is to make a complete graphic novel based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, sticking closely with the source material, and integrating the necessary adaptations to a visual format without messing up said source material.
Ever since I read Dracula in seventh grade, and saw the 1992 movie version several years later, I've wanted to do something with the story. There have been so many adaptations and retellings of the original novel that it seemed somewhat pointless to attempt anything myself. Towards the end of 2003, while looking for already written source material to practice comics on, I toyed with the idea of a literal adaptation of Dracula. While there are hundreds of movies and books based on the idea, very few that I've found aim to tell Bram Stoker's original story without changing it around or hacking it to pieces in various ways.
I actually wanted to adapt Island of Dr. Moreau. I made part of a comic script from it, and drew a few sketches, but my mind kept drifting back to Dracula. One of the first ideas I had for the project was that I wanted to draw the characters as animals. I do a lot of anthropomorphic/cartoon animal art, primarily because I like the value of animal characters as symbolic tools. We have strong archetypes connected to animals, and in making a character a fox, or a wolf, or a lion, those archetypes are invoked, giving the viewer an immediate idea of the character, and perhaps a better understanding of them as well.
Dracula himself has become such a present pop-culture icon that seeing the image of Bela Lugosi with the widow's peak/opera cape/black tux deal going on immediately invokes everything we 'know' about Dracula and vampires. We know he's going to hate the sun, speak with a thick Hungarian accent, turn into a bat at a moment's notice, and is here to suck your blood. We might also have an idea of how the story's supposed to go. Somehow, I'd acquired a vague idea of things before reading the book. I don't even remember how. A young woman is attacked by Dracula, and turns into a vampire herself. The people who were trying to save her have to drive a stake through her heart, then stake Dracula, too.
Because we know, quite plainly, that Dracula is a vampire, the actual story, I think, the beginning of the story, especially, has lost a bit of it's impact. The tension in Jonathan's imprisonment in the castle stems from him, and us, not knowing what exactly is going on. This is lost on today's movie-watching... even Sesame Street-watching readers.
When Van Helsing, at the end of his King Laugh speech, finally says that he knows exactly what killed Lucy, and later tells Jack and the rest about vampires, we've been waiting since the beginning for this to come out. And it's halfway through the book. No wonder modern adaptations have had to change so much.
I played with the idea of drawing the characters as animals because I like drawing animal characters, but I stuck with it because presenting the story, literal as is possible within the limits of the comic medium and my personal understanding of the text, but with cartoon animals - innocent and archetypal as they are - might cast just enough spin on the story to invoke what Bram Stoker was trying to get across, and not Bela Lugosi's performance.
Dracula had to be a wolf. What he represents, as the height of the Victorian vampire archetype, is exactly what the wolf has represented to us for centuries. His connection with wolves in the book is rather blatant.
I sketched a lot, and threw out a lot of drawings, before finally coming to a character design that was exactly what I was looking for. When I had that, I put Dr. Moreau on the back burner, and set to work on this project, quickly churning out Jonathan's model sheet, and a few more doodles.
I delayed a bit, making cover mock-ups and whatnot, and finally, in late September, sat down and inked the inner cover, plunked some suitably gothic text on there, and got to work on page one. And that was that.

The Process

I start each page by penciling in the border. Everything's drawn at 6x9”. I don't draw any larger than it'll be displayed, but I should know better than that. I'm working from the book itself, not from any script I've made, so I read over the section I'm at in my little red copy of Dracula, and decide how I'm going to lay out the page and who's going to say what. Most of the time, what's being said is pretty easy to determine from the text, even if Stoker hasn't directly scripted it out. Occasionally, and as will probably happen more often as I progress through the book, there are places where important dialog is only vaguely implied, and I have to come up with something that fits. I'm trying to make this as seamless as possible.
If I'm putting in a complicated background, I sketch that in first, then rough in the characters. I mark out where the speech balloons will go, do the lettering, then pencil in the details. Sometimes I do things in a different order. I don't really think about it too much.
How I ink depends on what materials I have and how dead they are. This comic eats black markers like nobody's business, and coloring a black field with a dying marker is no fun at all... which means when my markers are dying, I do the large black areas last. If my marker's new, I ink in the borders of the figures and speech balloons with the fine tip of a double ended brush pen, then ink in the background. The figures and backgrounds are outlined with that brush pen, and then the details are added with either my rapidoliner pen, which is the best pen ever, or a black gel pen, when the ink's run out on the rapidoliner. Then I erase the pencil marks and scan the sucker. In the computer, I equalize the blacks, so it doesn't look like I colored it with a dying marker. Then it goes online. That's about it.