“How graves give up their dead,

And how the night air hideous grows

With shrieks!”

Thus begins one of the most notorious “penny dreadfuls” in history.

I’d known about James Rymer’s “Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood” since I was a boy.  The woodcut image on the cover of the first installation is enough to capture the imagination of any child, I would suppose:

And I loved vampires.  I loved them almost as much as I loved ghost stories, which means a lot.  When Halloween came around, the only question in my mind was which to dress up as.

Later in life, I found the definitive book on vampires, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and was entranced at reading what I thought was the seminal version of the vampire story.  I loved it…corpses and graveyards, good and evil, monsters in the night searching for prey.

Vampires changed, though.  At least, their trappings did.  Suddenly, vampires were beautiful night-club visitors, or rock-stars, more acquainted with hair gel than coffins..less corpse-like and more like the bad-boy next door.  Immortal, troubled teens did not interest me, so I turned my back on vampires.

Recently, with the craze of the “Twilight” movies, I saw the name ‘Varney’ mentioned again, and I wondered if the campus library would have a copy of the serial published in 1845…40 years before Stoker would pen “Dracula”…and they did.  Carefully, I pulled the 1977 book off the shelf, read the first chapter…

And was hooked.  The images burst into my head as I read through the events of the horrible storm, the dark figure at the window….the vampire.

Not a teen boy, not a suave nobleman, this vampire was a hungry corpse..terrible and terrifying.  This was MY kind of vampire!

I put the book down and thought.

I knew that this serial (for it was published weekly, one chapter at a time), had the reputation of being a rambling and occasionally contradictory story that stretched out over an epic 230+ chapters.

But, there was magic here.  It would be a great story to be adapted to a webcomic format and put out weekly, as it was nearly 150 years ago.

I found and bought Mr. Curt Herr’s wonderfully annotated critical edition of the book. And hopefully, with his guidance, I can lead the candle-lit way though a story full of bood, gore, cemeteries and vampires.

I have to thank Mr. Anthony Schiavino for his incredible talent at lettering and design for helping me with this endeavor, and for his friendship and support.

So, here we are at the start of a journey that will, at best, take years of my life to tell.

Together, let’s dig down through the dirt of 150 years and uncover THE vampire that inspired them all.

-Dave