As a huge fan of Dracula that already owns several different versions of the book – annotated editions, anniversary editions, and various illustrated editions – to say that I was excited to get my hands on this graphic novel is putting it lightly. However, my excitement rapidly devolved into a hollow disappointment as I went through the book. Oh, it does a decent job of telling the story, but does so in an unenthusiastic, nearly clinical manner.
To begin with, the layout of the pages were horribly boring, with most pages depicting 9 panels per page framed with a bold black border. There is so much more that can be done with panel organization nowadays and this book dropped the ball. Instead of using the panel framing to enhance the story by doing full page spreads or various layering as is often found in comics, this volume stuck to the sterile 3x3 layout. This also caused problems with the lettering and the images being forced to be incredibly tiny.
The illustrations themselves were also disappointing. The interior artwork is done by a different artist than the one that did the cover images, which is often the case in graphic novels. However, they usually try to match styles. The interior style was done in a realism format that looks like sloppy acrylic painting (probably done in Photoshop and not in actual acrylics), and I mean sloppy. I’m sure some people will appreciate the interior style, but I was not a fan and strongly believe that the book would have been better off if they had used a more traditional comic book style (like the cover pages) rather than shoddy realism.
The font choices were also poor. Seeing as how Dracula is an epistolary novel, the letterer chose a basic typewriter font to depict the segments that they chose to tell in the past (or letter) format. However, the particular font they chose was incredibly difficult to read in such a small size. They would have been better off using a sans serif font like Helvetica to depict the letters, and the standard comic sans for the dialogue portion.
All said, the book does do a decent job of illustrating Dracula directly, so if you’re looking for a straight up illustrated version of the book (such as you’re being assigned to read the book in class and don’t want to work on using your own imagination to visualize the novel), than you may enjoy this more than I did. My disappointment comes from my hope that they would have taken the opportunity to use the comic book medium to do something visually stimulating and dynamic with the work (come on, comics can be absolutely stunning, the medium is designed to be visual); instead what I got was a shoddy illustrated depiction of the novel from someone who can’t, or refused to use their own imagination.