Bela Lugosi lives… in the funny pages.

Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian expatriate actor who achieved a kind of damned immortality in Hollywood as the first, proper cinematic DRACULA (1931), went to his own grave on August 16, 1956, before many of us were born. He has lived on, after a fashion, in the many movies he made and which still exist in one medium or another (from Tod Browning’s THE THIRTEENTH CHAIR to Ed Wood’s bargain bin magnum opus PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE), in countless bad impersonations (“Bleh!  Bleh!  I vant to suck your blood!” – he totally never said that), in wax statues, plastic action figures and ceramic mugs, in plush toys, lapel buttons, tee shirts and countless other novelties, homages, tributes and lampoons, both loving and cruel.  Other actors did challenge Lugosi’s dominance as the go-to guy for all things Dracula – Lon Chaney, Jr. in SON OF DRACULA (1943), John Carradine in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944) and HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945), Francis Lederer in THE RETURN OF DRACULA (1958) – but it wasn’t until Christopher Lee reinterpreted the Undying Count with a seductive vengeance for Hammer Studios’ Technicolor DRACULA (US: HORROR OF DRACULA, 1958) that Lugosi’s grasp on the role loosened.  (In the actor’s defense, he had been dead for two years.)  Many more wispy thesps (and a few hefty ones) have worn the cape and wingtips of the Prince of Darkness in the ensuing half century but no one ever equaled or surpassed the unearthly and genuinely eerie qualities that Bela Lugosi brought to the role…

Lugosi’s phonetic command of English caused some oddly hypnotic phrasing in his work in Universal’s DRACULA (where his emPHAsis always seemed to be on the wrong syLLAble) but his brilliance in the role can’t be reduced to a language gap, nor should his iconic presence be written off 80 years later as mere kitsch.  Lugosi had been by 1931 an actor on stage and screen for decades; he’d been in the US since 1923 and his craft was spot on.  Lugosi was Dracula.  Too bad Browning’s adaptation of the Hamilton Deane-John L. Balderston stage play was so stodgy and set-bound (I still like it, though) because I think that Browning’s authorial inflexibility leached out to taint Lugosi’s interpretation in the estimation of modern viewers.  But I digress.  My point – and I do have one – is that Lugosi has lived for more than half a century since his death, lived in the hearts and dreams and imaginations of many MonsterKids who came of age in his long shadow.  Such a MonsterKid was (and is) Kerry Gammill. A veteran comic book artist, graphic designer and storyboard artist/special effects visualizer for the movies, Gammill has been carrying the Lugosi torch for decades and has finally decided to make his passion for the man, the myth and the monster a going concern with the new comic Bela Lugosi’s Tales from the Grave (Monsterverse Comics):

“It’s something I’d been thinking about for a long time. I’ve known Bela Lugosi Jr. for quite a while and I had done graphics for a couple of Lugosi Enterprises projects in the past. Several years ago we talked about doing a Lugosi/Dracula graphic novel but it was just too big a project for me to take on at the time. But that is what got me thinking about doing an anthology comic with Lugosi as the host. I grew up reading the early issues of the Warren horror comics Creepy and Eerie and I love that format. Most of my comic book career was spent drawing super-hero comics like Superman and Spider-Man, but my first love has always been monsters. I love the old classic movies with Lugosi, Karloff, Chaney Jr., Atwill, and those guys. And I still love those old Warren and EC horror comics. So Bela Lugosi’s Tales from the Grave is my way of combining those interests with what I did for a living for almost 20 years.”

Produced by Gammill, former DC Comics art director/inker Keith Wilson and artist/screenwriter Sam Park — and corralling the diverse talents of such artists as John Cassaday (Marvel Comics X-Men, DC Comics’ Batman), Bruce Timm (BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES), animator Joe Freire, Jeff Preston (Monsterscene, Little Shoppe of Horrors), Rob Brown (Marvel Comics’ Spiderman, Silver Phoenix’s Bane of the Werewolf), James Farr (Xombie: Dead on Arrival), Chris Moreno (Marvel’s World War Hulk), Martin Powell (DC Comics’ Batman, Rumpelstiltskin: The Graphic Novel),  Terry Beatty (DC’s Batman, Scary Monsters), writer Derek McCaw, Rafael Navarro (creator of Ninth Circle’s Sonambulo), Gammill himself and legendary illustrator Basil Gogos (who painted many a staggeringly beautiful cover for Famous Monsters of Filmland in the 1960s and 70s) — Bela Lugosi’s Tales from the Grave will be a full-color anthology comic presenting tales of the weird, the fantastic, the unlikely and the unearthly.  Limited to a run of 10,000 copies, issue No. 1 will boast 48 pages of story, eye-popping original art and even a factual essay by Lugosi scholar Gary D. Rhodes.  The official street date is October 20th, just in time for Halloween 2010, but the comic can be preordered from your local comic shop up until August 27th.

I know I can’t wait!  This trailer gives me a pretty little chill, just as I used to experience as a fledgling MonsterKid reading borrowed issues of Creepy and Eerie (they were too scary to own!).  Remember, guys and ghouls, Monsterverse isn’t DC Comics or Marvel – they’re a small company servicing a niche (Latin for “elite, cool”) market and Bela Lugosi’s Tales from the Grave will endure only with the regular patronage of fiends like you.  Show your support, dig?!  This is clearly something we can all sink our teeth into.