Dark Horse presents “Sabretooth Vampire”

Thanks to Dread Central for the heads up. Dark Horse Comics just announced their new character for the anthology known as “Dark Horse Presents: Sabretooth Vampire.”

From the Press Release:
The Sabertooth Vampire (website here) is a webcomic about a tiny vampire hampered by his giant fangs. Will he pull his teeth out of the ground long enough to actually bite someone? Probably not.

“One of the first books that got me into comics in the Nineties was the original black-and-white Dark Horse Presents — back when it was serializing stuff like Sin City and The One Trick Rip-Off and Hellboy: The Wolves of Saint August,” said Russell. “So as you can imagine, getting to submit a few strips for DHP was a huge moment for me personally as well as professionally.”

Russell has collected the Sabertooth Vampire in two self-published minicomics: the 28-page Beware the Sabre-Toothed Vampire and the 56-page Sabertooth Vampire Unleashed. The strips frequently contradict themselves as Russell dives into the Sabertooth Vampire’s personal life — his awkward teenage years, his stints as King Arthur and a caveman, his solo dance parties, his run-ins with Abbott and Costello and assorted angry mobs, and his awkward trip around the world after someone mistakes him for a garden gnome.

“Porting my webcomic over to DHP was an awesome experience for three very specific reasons,” said Russell. “One, I got to add color to the strip with the help of ace cartoonist/colorist/brother-in-arms Bill Mudron. Two, I received some first-class professional editing from Scott Allie and Daniel Chabon. And three, I swung for the fences and asked if I could draw a crossover strip where the Sabertooth Vampire fought one particular world-famous Dark Horse character, and to my delighted surprise that character’s creator said yes.”

Russell added, “The Sabertooth Vampire is basically a ‘Road Runner’ riff on a single tragic idea: The dental feature that defines him as a vampire keeps him from being an effective vampire. Also he turns into a really pathetic bat.”

Look for the Sabertooth Vampire in Dark Horse Presents #12 and #14, on sale May 23 and July 18, 2012.

Check out the photos below:

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Press Release for Steve Niles’s “The Nosferatu Wars”

 Thanks to Scifi Mafia for the heads up. After the huge success of the 30 Days of Night series, Steve Niles has created another series involving vampires again.

Press Release:

When Steve Niles (Criminal Macabre, 30 Days of Night) premiered artwork from his upcoming collaboration with artist Menton3 (Monocyte, Proof: Endangered, Crawl to Me) via his Twitter feed, speculation and anticipation spread like wildfire across the Internet. Today, Dark Horse is proud to announce that this new vampiric tale will premiere in Dark Horse Presents!

The Black Plague was a time of death and misery . . . except for the undead. For vampires, the Black Death was a welcome relief from being hunted and a time of incredible growth for the undead. On the night of their wedding, two vampire lovers are torn apart and separated for five hundred years, setting off a sequence of events that will bring the modern world to its knees!

Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith redefined the vampire genre with the groundbreaking comic series 30 Days of Night in 2002. Ten years later, Niles is poised to make history again, as he and Menton3 blow the sparkle off of the undead in Nosferatu Wars, premiering in Dark Horse Presents later this year!“I haven’t been this excited about working on something in a long time. Menton3 is the perfect artist and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be doing this at Dark Horse,” Niles said. “This year I’m making a big push to become 100 percent creator owned. Nosferatu Wars will be a big part of that, I hope.”

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Bloody Disgusting Interview with “Shinku” writer Ron Marz

 Bloody Disgusting writer Big J recently spoken to Shinku writer Ron Marz about the comic.

Shinku is the epic story of one samurai’s war against a clan of vampires, as she tries to eradicate every last blood-sucker on the planet. The solicitations for this book summarized it best with, “If you’re looking for vampires that sparkle … this ain’t it.” Shinku is a vampire story with balls and it brings back the gritty, stomach turning horror that has been missing from other vampire titles on shelves.

Tell us about where the idea for Shinku originated?

RM: In all honesty, the seed of the idea came from a Vampirella story I was going to pitch years ago about Vampirella teaming up a Japanese vampire hunter. That story never even got pitched because the editor I wanted to work with left the company. So the concept went back into the slush pile in my brain, and eventually came out again as this samurai/vampire hunter story … sans Vampirella, obviously.

With the success of Twilight, True Blood, and 30 Days of Night the market for vampires is at an all-time high and oversaturated. How is Shinku different from your run-of-the-mill vampire romance story?

RM: Well, for starters, Shinku doesn’t suck like Twilight does. Obviously I’m being a little flippant here, but Shinku is me telling my version of a vampire story. The general Shinku concept was in place long before Twilight became a thing, or True Blood hit HBO. I was actually a little reticent to do Shinku now just because there’s such a vampire surge at the moment, and you never want to seem like you’re jumping on the bandwagon. But Shinku is in a lot of ways the anti-Twilight because our vampires are most definitely monsters who prey upon humanity, rather than cuddling with them. If anything, Shinku puts vampires back in the roll of unapologetic bad guys.

Read more of the interview here

Fearnet Interview with I…Vampire writer Joshua Hale Fialkov

 Fearnet recently spoken to I…Vampire writer Joshua Hale Fialkov about the comic book series:

I… Vampire blends different genres. It has horror, but there are superheroes present…

It’s fun because it’s juggling. You kind of constantly have to be pushing all the buttons at the right time, otherwise the whole thing falls down. The thing that sets us apart and makes this book special is that third ball – which sounds horrible when I say it out loud [laughs] – the third ball being superheroes. Finding a way to then also incorporate it into this chaotic world… In most vampire fiction, vampires are kind of it. They’re the top of the food chain. But at DCU there’s a rhyming demon running around. [Laughs.] There’s a walking neutron bomb walking around. There’s a soldier who can remake matter at his whim. So vampires are not the big guns. They are a minority and they’re a repressed class. You often get, in vampire fiction, the idea that they’re the handsome Europeans with the leather coats, and they’re their own class, which is better than everyone else. Well in this world they aren’t better than everyone else. They’re better than the normals. They’re better than regular humans, but there’s this whole other class above them that they’re about to come smack dab into.

That being said, what horror fiction, particularly vampire fiction, has impacted your work?

Certainly Creepy, Eerie and the DC horror stuff. But I’m a Richard Matheson. So the bulk of my horror… I love the kind of super-normal. I love the idea that the most awful thing in the world is not a monster, but is the guy living next door, or more specifically the guy inside you. So what I wanted to do with I… Vampire is take the same ethos that I’ve used in my other books, like Echoes and Elk’s Run, which are horror books in which the monsters are us. So I tried to take that same kind of mentality so that the awful thing… Certainly the murders and the genocide are horrible. But the real drive for Andrew is the personal part, that Mary led him on to think she was behaving herself when in fact she was out massacring people, and he more or less let it happen. That betrayal is the crux of the first arc. That’s the part that hits people and works. It’s the equivalent of having your girlfriend cheat on you. You have an understanding. You have a relationship set in stone, and this person goes behind your back and does the exact opposite. That to me is what makes the book. That’s why people responded so well. It’s what makes the book relatable. That it’s not about the mystical stuff. It’s really about people and relationships, which to me is what all good fiction should be.

Read more of the interview here

‘I…Vampire’ Writer Joshua Hale Fialkov’s Top 5 Vampire Sagas

 Fearnet recently chatted with I, Vampire writer Joshua Hale Fialkov about his favorite vampire sagas:

“1.) I’m gonna cheat and say Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Technically they’re vampires. Barely, but technically they’re vampires. And then 2.) Buffy and Angel. I’ll even lump those two together. 3.) The Lost Boys. I’m crazy about Lost Boys. Tonally there’s a lot in I, Vampire that’s sort of in that vein. 4.) I would go Dracula. That one’s easy. That’s a good one. 5.) I love the entirety of the Hammer Dracula series, even Dracula A.D. 1972, which is quite possibly the goofiest movie ever made.

 

Because what’s great about those movies is tonally they understand the Victorian-ness of it all, the gothic Victorianism. At the same time, as they moved off the source material and into the wacky, weird futurey stuff, they retained what’s great about those characters. They kept the mystery and they kept the sexiness, which – let me tell you – Christopher Lee was really pushing it towards the end of those movies. The sexy was not high on him. [Laughs.]

Read more about why he chose those sagas here

Source – Fearnet

Dracula vs. Robin Hood vs. Jekyll & Hyde First Digital Comic Book Release

Thanks to Horror Society for the heads up.  Here’s an excerpt about the comic book:

Publisher Mohawk Media has today released the first issue of its digital comic book series, Dracula vs. Robin Hood vs. Jekyll & Hyde.

Dracula vs. Robin Hood vs. Jekyll & Hyde is written by Chris Bunting and illustrated by JL Czerniawski, who previously collaborated on the publisher’s Mr. T graphic novels.

Bunting says: “I’ve already written a few famous faces, but this is something extra special: bringing a number of world-famous characters together for the ultimate showdown.

“My other goal was to redress the mistreatment these characters have so often received. Robin Hood isn’t portrayed here as the gallant hero he obviously never was, and Dracula is closer in tone to the original than perhaps ever before.

“As for Jekyll and Hyde, he was the main inspiration for the Hulk. Because of this, it never felt right that Hulk was always portrayed as bigger and stronger until now.

“But this isn’t just a horror tale, despite the Halloween launch of issue #1. It’s full of supernatural, sci-fi, superheroics ˆ and good old-fashioned scraps.

“It’s a clash of genres as much as it is a clash of the characters who embody and represent those genres.”

Read more of the article here

‘In The Dust’ Graphic Novel Adapted Into Film

 The Hollywood Reporter reports that the graphic novel ‘In The Dust’ will be adapted into a movie:

Stephen L’Heureux‘s Solipsist Films has preemptively picked up the rights to the upcoming Top Cow graphic novel In the Dust, created by George Mahaffey and Christian Duce. Mahaffey will write the adaptation.

L’Heureux will produce with Top Cow’s Matt Hawkins and Marc Silvestri executive producing.

Read more of the article here

 

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Wired Interview with ‘Shadowlaw’ creator Brandon Easton

 Wired Magazine writer Corrina Lawson recently chatted with the creator of the graphic novel ‘Shadowlaw’ Brandon Easton. Here’s an excerpt:

GeekDad: What drew you to a story that featured the Catholic Church in a struggle with vampires?

Brandon Easton: It was an amalgamation of a variety of my creative influences as well as a kind of rumination on the nature of power, government and religion. The original concept dealt with a chase adventure through a ruined landscape. Like if you mixed Book of Eli with The Lost Boys.

Concept drawing of the vampires in Shadowlaw

Over the years, the story and world changed to fit a more cohesive theme. The funny thing is that I originally came up with the story for Shadowlaw back in 1996 before the current vampire craze in pop culture.

GD: Tell us a little about the lead hero of the story.

BE: Rictor is a man whose parents were killed by government troops during what was believed to have been a botched raid. He was eventually adopted by the Chancellor of the New Earth Alliance (NEA). In a bizarre twist, Rictor would be indoctrinated in the ways of the people who murdered his parents and later finds himself in a similar situation at the beginning of the book.

GD: What other types of monsters are represented in the story?

From chapter two of Shadowlaw

BE: Not really too many monsters other than the cyborg vampires – something that I don’t think has ever been seen before. One of the first artists on the series (Scott Kester) designed the mech-vampires and he went above and beyond my expectations for their look. People are going to see some stuff that has never been done before in an American comic series.

Read more of the interview here

 

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‘The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod’ Turned Into Graphic Novels

‘The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod’ are going to be turned into graphic novels. The author (Heather Brewer) of the series has confirmed it in her blog:

“Sooooo many of you have been BEGGING, PLEADING, INSISTING that I create a graphic novel based on my Vlad series,” Brewer wrote on her blog.

“And now, with the amazing work of some incredibly talented peeps (including artist, Julia Laud, colourist, Richard Suwono, and brilliant writer, Tony Lee), I can bring you just what you’ve been asking for.”

The Eighth Grade Bites graphic novel will be available to purchase on August 16, 2012.

Read more of this article here

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Author Lia Scott Price’s Vampire Novel Now Free Online Comic

 Horror Society posted the news that Horror Author Lia Scott Price of the Vampire Trilogy novel “The Guardian, Revenant, and Dominion” (amazon.com) into a free online comic book.

In case you’re not familiar with her works, the main characters of Price’s book and films are called “Serial Killer and Vampire Guardian Angels™”. They are Guardian Angels with serious mental and psychological issues who have become Serial Killers. And if that’s not disturbing enough, they are also Vampires. So if you’re tired of the same old Vampire theme, meet Vampires with a fresh new twist: Your Guardian Angel is not only a vicious, psychopathic Serial Killer, but also a bloodthirsty Vampire.

 
Read more about this article and find out how you can read the online comic book here

 

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