Question for vampire cognoscenti
Are there any other straight comic-book retellings of Stoker besides the really awfully-drawn Puffin one (half-assed manga knock-off), and are they any good, or do you have links to them?
ETA: here's a page where you can download a scan of the original 1897 edition (honking 40MB pdf imaging of the actual pages!) plus plain text and another format I'm not familiar with, DjVu, which, hrm, seems to be some sort of compression of imaged pages to about 1/3 of the PDF and looks really interesting in terms of original-source data transfer potential. Learn something new every day on these internets, you do.
Further ETA: I posted this in comments, but this is too good not to frontpage - there's an unpublished but authentic Original Alternate Ending for Dracula which predates LOTR by over half-a-century thus making this one of the Oldest Ones In The Book, at least for the modern era of genre (hm, should pass this on to TV Tropes Wiki!) by virtue of the extant MS copy:
The castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sun and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light. As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment with a roar which seemed to shake the very heavens the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments while a mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke volume on volume in rolling grandeur was shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity. Then there was a stillness in nature as the echoes of that thunderous report seemed to come as with the hollow boom of a thunder clap - the long, reverberating roll which seems as though the floors of heaven shook. Then down in a mighty ruin falling whence they rose came the fragments that had been tossed skywards in the cataclysm.
From where we stood it seemed as though the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of ourselves.
Further concluding thoughts: In the hypothetical case of adapting Dracula graphically for a modern genre-savvy online audience, should one omit the occasional original infelicity, such as when Our Intrepid (Educated/Employed/Technophile) Heroine (possibly/probably acting as a mouthpiece for the author) makes sure to assure readers that she's Not A Feminist™ by taking an out-of-nowhere swipe at the "New Women", or her ditzy BFF blithers on about how could Desdemona fall for a black man, in keeping with the trend to, ahem, whitewash the past by making sure that historic charas who are Good Guys 'n' Gals don't express any views currently ill-regarded* - or just leave it in as part of the warts-and-all portrait of the past-via-its-own-self-imaging, and let it go right along with (no matter how Stoker intended it) the depiction of Leading Man Harker's utter and comic Innocent Englishman Abroad chumpitude, and the Idiot Plot hinging on the squarejawed Heroes' continuing "chivalrous" refusal to tell any of the women the crucial things they need to know to avoid becoming vampire bait, as part of the wince-inducing whole? Given that whole book is a series of unreliable/misled/willfully/ignorant narrations; given that vast amounts would have to be edited out; arguments could be made for either the pre-20th-century mode of restoration, paint over to pretty up, or the current leave-it-like-you-found-it model: I'd like to hear them both.
*in polite circles, at least.
ETA: here's a page where you can download a scan of the original 1897 edition (honking 40MB pdf imaging of the actual pages!) plus plain text and another format I'm not familiar with, DjVu, which, hrm, seems to be some sort of compression of imaged pages to about 1/3 of the PDF and looks really interesting in terms of original-source data transfer potential. Learn something new every day on these internets, you do.
Further ETA: I posted this in comments, but this is too good not to frontpage - there's an unpublished but authentic Original Alternate Ending for Dracula which predates LOTR by over half-a-century thus making this one of the Oldest Ones In The Book, at least for the modern era of genre (hm, should pass this on to TV Tropes Wiki!) by virtue of the extant MS copy:
The castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sun and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light. As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment with a roar which seemed to shake the very heavens the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments while a mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke volume on volume in rolling grandeur was shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity. Then there was a stillness in nature as the echoes of that thunderous report seemed to come as with the hollow boom of a thunder clap - the long, reverberating roll which seems as though the floors of heaven shook. Then down in a mighty ruin falling whence they rose came the fragments that had been tossed skywards in the cataclysm.
From where we stood it seemed as though the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of ourselves.
Further concluding thoughts: In the hypothetical case of adapting Dracula graphically for a modern genre-savvy online audience, should one omit the occasional original infelicity, such as when Our Intrepid (Educated/Employed/Technophile) Heroine (possibly/probably acting as a mouthpiece for the author) makes sure to assure readers that she's Not A Feminist™ by taking an out-of-nowhere swipe at the "New Women", or her ditzy BFF blithers on about how could Desdemona fall for a black man, in keeping with the trend to, ahem, whitewash the past by making sure that historic charas who are Good Guys 'n' Gals don't express any views currently ill-regarded* - or just leave it in as part of the warts-and-all portrait of the past-via-its-own-self-imaging, and let it go right along with (no matter how Stoker intended it) the depiction of Leading Man Harker's utter and comic Innocent Englishman Abroad chumpitude, and the Idiot Plot hinging on the squarejawed Heroes' continuing "chivalrous" refusal to tell any of the women the crucial things they need to know to avoid becoming vampire bait, as part of the wince-inducing whole? Given that whole book is a series of unreliable/misled/willfully/ignorant narrations; given that vast amounts would have to be edited out; arguments could be made for either the pre-20th-century mode of restoration, paint over to pretty up, or the current leave-it-like-you-found-it model: I'd like to hear them both.
*in polite circles, at least.