Dracula (Bram Stoker’s) (1992)

™ and ©1992 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. and Topps
Comics, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Topps Company, Inc.
This four-issue mini-series contains the official comics adaptation
of the Francis Ford Coppola film, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”



Vlad Dracula began life as a vicious and brutal Romanian prince who
drove 30,000 Turks from Constantinople in the name of the church
in 1462. But when his wife’s suicide forever damned her, he
renounced God.



Hundreds of years later, in1897, a mysterious Count Dracula drew a
young, ambitious lawyer named Jonathan Harker to a castle in
Transylvania. If Harker can survive the strange creatures that inhabit
the castle, he will return to Mina, his true love in London. However,
Dracula is bound for London as well.



Scripted by comics legend Roy Thomas, with art by the stylistically
dark Mike Mignola, the Coppola version of Dracula follows the
Bram Stoker original more closely than earlier film versions of the
tale. Each issue may also contain an “Inside Coppola’s Dracula”
special feature with essays and photos related to the movie.



>>Monsters galore:

-Mike Mignola.

Mignola was born around 1962. He grew up in the Bay Area of
California, developing an early passion for monster stories,
particularly those in comic books. He experienced a defining
moment when, as a sixth grader, he read Bram Stoker's classic
horror novel Dracula. In an interview with Neda Ulaby on National
Public Radio's (NPR) Morning Edition, Mignola recalled: "When I
read Dracula, I said, 'I'm done. I'm done picking that other stuff.
I found my thing.'" He explained to Brayshaw, "It's not just that I
started liking monsters—it's that I started liking monsters to the
exclusion of everything else." His reading choices thereafter
consisted of ghost stories and other tales of the scary and
supernatural, as well as myths, or ancient stories handed down
through the generations, from cultures all over the world.




"Basically, it's taking everything I've been reading since high
school, everything I ever liked, everything I ever read, old movies,
tons of pulp magazines and stuff I read in college, fairy tales—all
that stuff I've read, going back to Dracula in sixth grade, all that
stuff I've been thinking about since then, I boiled it all down and
made it into Hellboy."



Mignola knew even during childhood that he wanted to grow up
to be a comic book artist. He even knew he wanted to live in New
York City. Growing up in California, Mignola never learned to drive.
He explained to Brayshaw that he figured, "'Eventually you're going
to live in New York, so don't bother learning how to drive. They
have taxis there.'" His lifelong goal—to simply find a job drawing
monsters—may seem modest, but Mignola pursued that goal with
a passionate intensity. After graduating from the California College
of Arts and Crafts in 1982, Mignola headed straight for New York.
He had some connections in the comics industry, having done a
short inking job for Marvel Comics. His first attempts at finding
work were mildly successful, but after six months he returned to
California, hoping to obtain long-distance freelance work from
the New York-based comics companies. When those offers
dwindled, Mignola headed back to the East Coast again, and his
persistence finally paid off. He began to get regular work
illustrating comic books and covers.



In 1983 Mignola got his first series work as the penciler—the
person creating a comic's initial drawings based on the writer's
plot—for Marvel's Rocket Raccoon, a four-issue work featuring
the title character, a time-traveling law enforcement officer.
Mignola also worked on several superhero titles and did some
illustrating for The Incredible Hulk comic books. In 1988 Mignola
left Marvel to work for rival DC Comics. At that time, with the
1986 start of Alan Moore's The Watchmen and Frank Moore's The
Dark Knight Returns series, DC had made great strides in the
field of comic books and graphic novels aimed at adult readers.
The dark, often violent subject matter of such comics appealed
to Mignola, and at DC he established his reputation as an exciting
and notable artist. He provided illustrations for Jim Starlin's
Cosmic Odyssey and created the covers for the series Batman:
A Death in the Family. One of his projects at DC involved plotting
a Batman story in which the superhero confronts a ghostly villain.
He enjoyed crafting the story's plot as well as creating its images,
and began thinking he would like to try it again. A few years later
he got that opportunity.