The Virgin’s Embrace, the first entry in the Stokerverse, is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s short story The Squaw, created by Stoker’s great grand-nephew Dacre Stoker, writer Chris McAuley, artist Jessica Martin and letterer Bonnie Dixon. The book includes both Stoker’s original story, the graphic novel adaptation, and historical and technical notes. Shortly after publication, Stoker, McAuley and Martin chatted with Paul Simpson…

Who’s choice was the original story?

Dacre: I’ve got to take credit for that. It’s one of those stories that, in my fifteen years of my research of my great granduncle Bram, just seemed to me to be sort of sitting out there, not exactly in the Dracula world.

I was constantly looking for what was Bram doing while he was writing these stories and I was trying to find realistic links. I’m very interested in that with Dracula but I believe this is the short story that has the most obvious direct links to Bram Stoker, Florence, his life. I found evidence of a very good chance of them going to Nuremberg, maybe together; if not [then the story] was sort of an imagination of their honeymoon.

There were all these little things that started connecting Bram’s life. The cat in his life, the trip to Nuremberg, the story that involves obviously Elias P. Hutcherson – which is loosely based on Buffalo Bill.

It just seemed this needed to be the first story out the gate of the Stokerverse and when Chris and I started getting together and he mentioned Jessica, it all came together as the perfect first story for us to work on together to set the tone.

Were there concerns about the portrayal of the violence to the cat because obviously that is a trigger for a lot of people? Jessica, in the art, you make no bones about what happens to the kitten and later what the cat does. The idea of a creature taking revenge is one thing but the actual catalyst, throwing the rock, is something that could potentially have been changed?

Dacre: Well, it could have but I also felt that this was Bram’s way of luring you into a nice comfortable story. People on a honeymoon, they meet this brash American and then one thing happens, the killing of the kitten. Oh gosh that’s horrible, and now is that the extent of it?

With Bram’s stories you’re never really sure what’s going to happen next and I just felt that, yes we could have taken that ending out but we decided to put a disclaimer in at the beginning to warn people and say, ‘Look, if you’re put off by cruelty to animals this is not a story for you’.

The fact is there was always a cat in the Stoker household. There were also cats at the Lyceum Theatre, to get rid of the mice and the rats. Bram was very sensitive to cats so I knew, in his own heart, he knew he was creating a shocker, that was designed to shock and to terrorise his readers. So to take out this horrifying ending at the end of a horrifying story would have defeated the purpose of what Bram’s really trying to do.

So rather than cleanse it totally we decided, “Well, we’re all big boys and big girls”, let’s give a disclaimer and let the readers decide for themselves if they want to go that far.

Chris: That was about the hardest thing I’d ever had to write. Everybody who knows me knows I love cats, so it was very difficult.

We’re talking about a story written 130 odd years ago; were there other elements that you felt you needed to re-address for a modern audience?

Chris: This is about revenge, it’s about feminine revenge, and it’s about the concept of death being a woman for Elias. At every point you can see the feminine concept of revenge peppered throughout, and that takes us through to what happens with the Apache.

I injected a little bit more of a back story for Elias to give a context. I didn’t want Elias to be a black and white villain. The Apache lady is justified within her culture for what she does to Splinters, because of what Splinters does to her child, so you see the parallel between the cat and the kitten.

But I think it gave a bit more of a rounded story when we see Elias coming in. He’s checked to see what’s happened to the traitor; the traitor’s on fire, put to death in what Bram terms as ‘fire torture’ and that shocks him. Then he comes under attack so he defends himself and I wanted to build up that drama and that tension. He’s going for the gun and the native lady’s hell bent on his destruction.

That gives you more of a well rounded character rather than just a villain.

Jessica, you talk in the book about how you researched the native items. Did anything from that research alter how you viewed Elias and how you portrayed him?

Jessica:. Like Chris said, we present him as a character who’s performing as he believes is right for him and according to the code of the day.

It’s interesting because we’ve mentioned that Bram Stoker was friendly with Buffalo Bill – he admired him, he ran his shows – but I can’t help feeling there is a subconscious criticism or a divide here between a British sense of being civilised and this Elias character who is kind of wild and a bit like an overgrown boy. For God’s sake, thinking it’s fun to just throw a rock at a cat – grow up! Bram is not throwing any judgement but the actions of Elias speak for themselves.

There’s an ancient Greek drama saying that in a way there’s no such thing as plot, character is fate. Elias’ cards were dealt a long time ago because he just is an aggressive person. You see from his flashbacks later in the story, that if he were living today, he’d be climbing Everest, he’d be doing extreme sports, he’d be doing anything that’s dangerous.

The Apache woman doesn’t feature very much in the story but aside from being a Native American, we know she’s a mother with a baby and the cat is a mother with a baby.

As far as illustrating goes, it’s a far cry from anything that I’ve done before. In my artwork, or indeed, even in my showbiz career, I’ve always been a family entertainer, light entertainment. But I rose to the challenge with this and I have to say that having got a copy of Barry Windsor-Smith’s Monsters delivered the other day and the first page I look at is a really horrible page with something terrible happening with a small child and there’s a mother there…

Anybody that knows comics, knows that they go to very dark places and if I didn’t want to do this or wasn’t prepared to go the distance with it then I should have put my hand up right at the start and said to Chris and Dacre, ‘It’s not for me, I’d rather do The Sound of Music graphic novel, thank you very much.’

I’m not into heavy rock but I know that people who like heavy metal, oftentimes they tend to be the sweetest, gentlest people you’ve ever met and then they’re headbanging and going nuts at a concert. And lots of people I’ve met in the comics world are the mildest, sweetest, loveliest people but comics are a place for self expression if you’re a comics writer. And if you’re reading it, it’s a release as well and I don’t want to get too Jungian about this but it is about recognising the shadow and the dark side.

I think that out of this, what could be construed as just Bram doing a Penny Dreadful story is actually a very layered story. Elias is, I guess the antagonist, although he sees himself as the protagonist. And then you’ve got the group protagonists, the cat and the mother, and you’ve got Florence as well, she’s just on holiday and gets dragged into all this. It’s almost like she’s gone with her boyfriend to the pictures and they’ve turned up and he’s said, ‘Hey we’re going to see The Exorcist’ and there’s no turning back now.

It’s a really multifaceted story. In a short story you just get to see so many different points of view and it is disturbing and it is controversial and it’s worrying. I showed it to a friend of mine who has a menagerie at home, and she was really struggling but at the end of it she said ‘Oh, I was rooting for the cat’! With a story you don’t want them to say ‘Oh, that was a nice story’, you want to have something definitive or something that sparks a debate.

I haven’t seen anybody remark on it yet but we’re talking about the treatment of minorities a lot nowadays and it’s time for the invisible people and the invisible gender to speak up for themselves – and Bram Stoker did it in a very subtle way, that you could almost read it from any stance.

The Native American woman isn’t as prominent but she’s the title of the original I understand the cultural reasons for changing the title from The Squaw but does it not lose a part of the thematic feel, that you know going in because there’s the resonance of what the Squaw was in that culture?

Dacre: That was one of the most important things. We didn’t want to right off the bat, throw this thing into the fire and create controversy. The Virgin of Nuremberg obviously is a fictional creation – as Chris and his research pointed out, iron maidens weren’t really used. It’s kind of like vampire slaying kits: they’re better known nowadays than they were, but what it represents is, obviously, is the female killing machine.

So we have a pretty good parallel between the Apache woman, the female cat and the Virgin of Nuremberg killing machine. As a way to deal with updating the story and political correctness, I think the title The Virgin’s Embrace is a wonderful blend. You still get the idea there’s something lurking there that is very dangerous but what is it?

And the fact that we included the full original story with its title in the book, with my explanation in the introduction about it, I think allowed us to cover that situation. If we were only going to publish the graphic novel and not acknowledge the origin of the story then we would have had  a more difficult time wrestling with that issue.

But was that always the intention, to do both together?

Dacre: It wasn’t always the intention but it became the intention with about a month to go as to how to solve the problem. It was one of these ‘a-ha’ moments that Chris and Jessica and Paul and I all had. It was like, ‘Oh, thank goodness. Let’s pad this thing out, let’s give the fans the original story, then the Stoker/McAuley/Martin adaptation. And let’s put in some biographical stuff, let’s expand the intro and the afterword.’

I love drawing back the curtain and seeing Jessica Martin’s explanation of what she went through to address this, some of her sketch work. That to me is a very interesting thing that readers get to look at, the creative process of the artist. And that’s what we’re planning to do with this whole series going forward: each one that we do, our adaptation will have some degree of historical background, what Bram was doing at the time, what the artist went through. That’s become the model really stepping out of our desire to wrestle with this issue which I think is going to be quite successful going forward.

Chris: Just to add on the cultural issue: I was actually working with the Cultural Minister for Canada and he’s seen The Virgin’s Embrace. It’s been very important to make sure that there’s nothing in anything that we write or produce that would denigrate a person from another culture. We did get specific praise stating that we’ve handled a possibly troublesome piece of classic text and we’ve been able to bring that forward into this generation, quite successfully, tactfully and without losing any of the original material. That was a nice affirmation.

Dacre: One other quick thing: Bram Stoker got to know Buffalo Bill, brought him over to the UK and helped him produce things but he was very well known for using his relationships of people, his understanding of people, to create what we call a composite characters. And since we’re talking on this issue of sensitivity, none of us know exactly what was going on inside Buffalo Bill’s mind throughout his life. Maybe Elias Hutcherson was a racist and so on, a thrill seeker, but we’re not saying Buffalo Bill necessarily was. Bram actually used parts of his relationship and his understanding of Buffalo Bill to create Quincey Morris, and Grizzly Dick in The Shoulder of Shasta.

Bram did this with all sorts of characters: Vlad the Impaler was a piece of Count Dracula as was, I’m convinced, Henry Irving playing Mephistopheles. This was just the way Bram took bits and pieces of people to make these characters seem real, real enough so that his readers would have some serious pause and wonder, maybe the story is real. I just wanted to say we’re not pointing a finger at relatives of Buffalo Bill and saying he was necessarily that person, there were bits of him in this story.

One of the cool things that I’ve found in Bram’s own journal that he had with him many times – he was constantly writing story ideas, very much like he portrayed Jonathan Harker.

That’s why I’m convinced if he was in Nuremberg with the Irving group, which I’m almost positive he was and if he did bring Florence along, he probably was writing “saw cat down here, did this.” He probably saw things that he then amalgamated into the stories. It may have been a different castle but it’s just all too perfect that these things were there. That’s what all good writers do and Bram was one of those: he was constantly jotting down things and included them when he needed them.

What was your process for the script for this? Did you actually go through the original prose writing out or deleting areas that were purely description or did you basically have the book and wrote the script based on what you were reading.

Chris: It’s a bit of a strange process to be honest. I listened to the audio books over and over and over again. I took different audio books from different voice actors and listened to their cadences, I listened to their different emphasis and studied that to try and get the real nuances of the original story.

I do a lot of my writing at night – most writers in my experience do that – and this germinated between the hours of  two o’clock and six o’clock in the morning. I just had a very clear vision in my head of how the story was going to go. It was almost like a film in my head and I just typed it. I think it was the fact that because I had listened to those audio books over and over again plus reading the story a couple of times that I was already playing it almost like a movie.

I’m a very visual writer so that’s how I constructed the script then Dacre looked over it, edited it and gave me some suggestions. He came up with the idea of using Bram and Florence, so we used that and I think that gave it a little bit more of a grounding in reality as well.

How detailed were the scripts that you sent through to Jessica, in terms of visual descriptions?

Chris: You’ve got to let Jessica answer that because I don’t really know.

Jessica: Dacre and I agree on this: Chris is a very gifted and a very instinctive writer. This sounds like a very backhanded compliment but I just think with Chris you get it straight from the heart, straight from the hip. The way that he scripted the whole comic for me was so helpful because, as he says and I’m exactly the same as him, I see things as movies in my head and he just basically was describing what he could see.

For me, drawing is never an easy task but I knew what I had to draw and then when I knew that I knew what things I had to research and fill in all the blanks etc. But he’s very gifted but not as pedantic as [some people].

It was lovely: it was a nice balance between Chris’s vision but also giving me breathing space to bring my own interpretation to the book. I’m very proud of what I’ve done because it has been a stretch, but I feel that’s what I needed at this stage. I think if I carried on doing any more of my own comics and graphic novels, I’d get very comfortable so this has been a real test of my mettle.

The use of the calligraphy, the lettering, the use of the words is excellent – there’s one panel showing the stone going down…

Jessica: That’s from Bonnie Dixon who is the other member of the Stokerverse. This is her first work out of the gate; she’s trained as a graphic designer but she learned how to do lettering. She’s got that feeling for the visuals. She came up with these incredible things like the writing matching the wall and the way that the writing is. There are a lot of scenes that are very dark and she was very clever in how she got the lettering to stand out. And the shapes of it as well are very organic.

Chris: What’s lovely about this whole experience? This has been fun. I really want to underline this: I have fun working with Dacre, he’s one of the best guys. I love working with Jessica – when I started this process, when I was writing the script for this way back in October in my mind Jessica was illustrating this. That’s why whenever I started showing Dacre some of Jessica’s work he was like, ‘Yes, go and ask her’ and I thought ‘I hope she’s interested’.

My wife does the lettering and there’s no other way of putting it: she has moments of absolute genius where she’ll say ‘Come and see this.’ I’ll be doing something else and come and look at it and I‘ll go, ‘That’s great.’

That moment with the stone, that was five different attempts. I said, ‘OK, think about the kinetic energy of the stone coming down’ and then she got it straight away. It’s just such a vibrant fun team to be a part of.

What has been the biggest challenge of this project?

Dacre: I think the biggest challenge is summed up with the word trust. We haven’t done another project together and yet somehow through this process trust has built.

It really has to do with Chris who was the ringmaster. ‘I know this person Jessica she’s done all this Doctor Who stuff,’ he told me. He never said ‘Oh just trust me’, it’s his mannerism. He’s just enthusiastic, saying,  ‘Oh Jessica’s done this stuff, I’ve got to send it to you – and Bonnie, she can do this.’ He didn’t say, ‘Trust me, she’s learning lettering, Bonnie’s taking this online course and she can do it, I’m going to work with her together.’

It’s like how a good family works together, once you’ve been through many things; we hadn’t been through much but there was this element of trust that was there because Chris created that feeling between the four of us. And remember, there was a publisher who had to believe in us and trust us as well so this was really an extended family.

I think the hardest thing was sitting back with a baby that I thought really needed good attention, a good team to put it together, and allowing Chris and company to proceed with it.

Chris: Bringing it all together. From the initial vision to what we have now is incredible and it was getting from the initial vision to where we are now and juggling everything, making sure everything came together.

I want everybody on the team to feel supported, so making sure Jessica feels supported, giving her that freedom and saying, ‘OK, if you can do this page better go on ahead’ and she did. There are three pages I can clearly remember where she said, ‘Let’s try this’ and Dacre and I looked at it and said ‘Yes absolutely fantastic.

Making sure that Dacre felt supported in his vision for this project and that he felt that his ancestor was being honoured because that’s really important in the Stokerverse. We do all sorts of things in the Stokerverse. We’re doing cyberpunk, we’re doing sci-fi, but through it all it’s about honouring Bram

And then presenting it all to the publisher and going. ‘What do you think? Do you like this? Is this something that you really want to take on?.

Jessica: I had two challenges. The first challenge was a very prosaic challenge which was that we were moving house at the time that I had my get set go on The Virgin’s Embrace happening and I knew how much time I needed. So it was a thing of being up against it, unpacking, making sure I’ve got a space set up to do the art and then the boiler packed up in the second week, which was Siberian weather! We’ve got an annex, which is our guest place, which was all cosy and warm. I had a little light in there and I was like a monk. I just went in there, dawn till dusk, making sure pages happened.

The other challenge was just the challenge that I face as a human being and I think everybody who’s an artist does, which is self doubt. Every time you do a new story, you’re going to do things you’ve never done before. It’s like when Chris asked me to do this and I thought ‘Me? Dracula?’

You’re a werewolf, what are you moaning about?

Jessica: Well, funnily enough Chris loved my work on the Doctor Who Titan comic story that I did and I know I played Mags in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy but in terms of what I’ve been doing in comics, I was doing movie star stories, I wasn’t doing sci-fi or horror or fantasy. But I found my inner gothic artist and I now claim this is me, this is my style. I’ll be looking at Giovanni Piranesi fantasy prisons for the next project!

When I was doing the horrible gory horrific bits, a friend of mine who is my sort of silent partner – who tells me if the perspective is good or not, he is quite an obsessive person for detail and he doesn’t pull any punches – looked at the horror pages and said, ‘Do you know what you should do? Get all the anatomy pictures, photos, anything… You’ve got to make this real. The more visceral and the more it looks real, the better because you’re writing a horror story.’

The challenge was that this story hasn’t been a comic before and this is the extra horror for the reader because when they’re reading it they can sense how much they want to go into the dark.

As a teenager I used to love those Pan series of horror story anthologies with the garish covers in the 70s. I can remember there was one which had a skull on the cover, the skull still had a bit of hair on it and a horrible centipede coming out of the mouth.

Chris: Mentioning covers, we have to bring up Ester Cardella’s cover. Amazing, absolutely amazing cover. She’s actually in the process of pencilling and inking a full comic for us at the moment.

This doesn’t pull any punches when you go in, does it?

Chris: No. Just wait till you see the next one.

The Virgin’s Embrace is available now from AUK; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk