Written by Troy Brownfield, who recently published (also through Dynamite) the prose novel Prince Dracula, the story promises to be a lot of bloody fun, and when we had some time with him recently (more on that soon), we asked him:
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How do you balance a deep mythology with which everyone is very familiar, like Dracula’s, and one that comparably fewer people can jump into?
Well, that’s a great question. Let’s take a look at the first thing: We had the first series of Blood Queen and one of the things that Dynamite has always done well is manage these meetings between characters. They’ve had the Conan/Red Sonja thing going on right now and you’ve had Vampirella and Dawn recently. The notion when I was talking about what we coud do with Blood Queen next is, a versus kind of situation seemed like a natural and it’s a very comfortable fit.
So Blood Queen Versus Dracula sounds like something that could be a cool idea thematically and it fits. Then you get into historically. Is Dracula Vlad? They have the common enemy of the Ottoman Empire. Whether you’re going kind of a more fantasy way or whether you’re going a more historical way, there is a way to balance that. By the time of Bathory, Dracula, the real Vlad, would have been dead close to 150 years so if you make a presupposition at that his time of death was really his time of becoming a vampire, then you have a character who has been a vampire for around 100 years at this point and has been doing his best to blunt the advance of the Ottoman Empire.
And then on his journeys, he comes back and discovers that this small corner over here near Hungary, you have this woman who’s consolidating this power and he needs to check that out. So you have a setup that allows both stories to work together and then address this common thread that runs through the region, which is the Ottoman as a looming “Other” force.
