Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Tag: Dracula

Tom Yeates — Dracula vs. Zorro?

Original Art and The Artists

Dracula Versus Zorro #2, November 1993

Dracula vs. Zorro.? For about a millisecond, this one sounds a bit odd, and then you say, wait a minute…

In the hands of writer Don McGregor and artist Tom Yeates (inks by Rick Magyar), you get a fun Topps Publishing two-parter, with Don’s smart writing and Tom’s magnificent storytelling — on giant art boards, no less.

A few notes:

• ˜The book came out just shy of 30 years ago.

• Dracula (The Francis Ford Coppola adaption kind) was Topps very first comic book; Dracula vs Zorro appears just before the launch of Topps’ Zorro solo series, also featuring stories by McGregor. (The crossover wasn’t originally planned as the character’s introduction— it just sort of happened, following the smash success of the Drac adaptation…)

• It’s only two monthly issues but features a whopping 61 pages of content — which leads me to believe we may have originally intended the story to total three issues. Perhaps we scaled back after the numbers came in for issue #1. Although we collected it in a prestige format comic in 1994, there are definitely not enough pages for a full trade collection. That was an era when we didn’t always plan for collections.

Mike Mignola — On The Road To Hellboy

Original Art and The Artists

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, #3, December 1992


Happy Halloween! Today we wrap up our two-week series celebrating the best in monsters, mystery and mayhem.

Here’s a sweet page from Roy Thomas and Mike Mignola’s adaption of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Fun Fact: All the pages in this adaption are “sweet.” There’s not a miss in the bunch. In fact it’s one of the best looking of any film adaptations ever done in comics. (Top of mind, only Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson’s Alien graphic novel is in the same league.) 

It’s also fair to say that while the film itself is fine (mixed reviews when it was released), the comics adaption itself is actually better.

Fun Fact: Coppola liked Mike’s art so much he hired him to provide illustrative material for the film itself, and Mike’s work is credited in the movie. 

Fun Fact: The title was the launch project for Topps Comics, and was in development prior to the hiring of an actual Editor-In- Chief. (Jim Salicrup.)

Fun Fact: John Nyberg inked the series in spectacular fashion— it’s astonishing how anyone but Mike could make it so “Mignola-like,” but John nails it. The brilliantly effective coloring is by Mark Chiarello, who later colors the first full Hellboy series, Seed of Destruction.  (Hellboy himself appears for the first time just a few months after Dracula concludes in an SDCC giveaway comic book.)

Fun Fact: For many years, Dracula was a lost classic — one of the few major Mignola projects not in print — for more than 20 years. I personally chased those reprint rights for 10 of those 20. Sometimes, insane tenacity pays off.

Fun Fact: It’s the first comic book I ever worked on professionally, and its reprint was one of the final projects published prior to my departure from IDW. (I will have to figure out a way to bring another version to my next publishing home. Ha.)

Fun Fact: Despite one of the best looking comic book series ever, it’s unlikely there will ever be an “artists edition” style book. The originals are scattered to the wind, and only occasionally offered for sale. I consider myself fortunate to own this one.

  • First story appearance of Hellboy, SDCC comic, July 1993
  • First color appearance of Hellboy, script by John Byrne,
    December 1993
  • First full issue of Hellboy,
    March 1994