Just Another Night at the Vampire Club: William Harms on IMPALER

By: KURT AMACKER
Date: Wednesday, August 16, 2006

This October, Dracula will once again rise from the dead to haunt comic shops. Image will bring William Harms's unique vision of the historical Dracula to New York City in IMPALER. The prince awakens in modern times to fight a vampire plague begun centuries ago in his own country of Walachia. Combining elements of the real-life Vlad Dracula with Bram Stoker's fictional counterpart, Harms will pen an ongoing series the first for the character in quite a while with art by Nick Postic and Nick Marinkovich of IDW's UNDERWORLD. A couple of days ago, I had a chance to talk with William about IMPALER and all things undead.

Kurt Amacker: Give me a little background on IMPALER. Tell me about its inception and getting on board with Image.

William Harms: I've actually been working on it for almost three years now. Originally, it was going to be a series of graphic novels with Steve Pugh, who worked on HELLBLAZER and PREACHER: SAINT OF KILLERS. He was going to do the art but, for a variety of reasons, was unable to. Then, I was back at square one. Then, I saw the Nicks' artwork in DIGITAL WEBBING PRESENTS for the first time. I did a lot of Googling and tracked them down. They were interested, but at the time, they were doing the UNDERWORLD adaptation for IDW. That ended up being two different series. That took them about a year, so essentially I was waiting for their schedule to clear up.


KA: I think it worked out, though. The art's really good very stark and heavy on the blacks.

WH: The Nicks are awesome. I had very firm ideas of how the vampires should look, and they totally nailed it right out of the gate. They delivered it exactly the way it looked in my head. We ended up with Image because I'd been speaking to Erik Larson about a different book. And then over time, I mentioned it to him once the Nicks' schedule freed up. And this past WonderCon is when the deal was finalized. I met Erik at the show and asked him what he thought. He looked at it for five minutes and said, 'Yeah, we'll do it.' Image has been fantastic. They've been very supportive of the book. They made a promo poster to give away at San Diego Comic Con. They've done everything I could ask them to do.

KA: Did IMPALER spin out of a personal interest in the real-life Vlad Dracula or the Bram Stoker novel, or did you just get the idea and run with it?

WH: I've always been a big fan of horror. As a young kid, I read a lot of stuff about Vlad, and Bram Stoker, and Dracula. I'd wanted to do a vampire book for quite a while. I was just trying to get my head around how to do it and be different than other things out there. There's a book called DRACULA: PRINCE OF MANY FACES. It's about the only good biography about Vlad.

KA: By Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally? That's a great book.

WH: Exactly reading through that, there's no question that Vlad was totally sadistic. But to his people, he was a hero because he fought to protect them from the Turks. On the one hand he fought for good, but the way he did it was extremely brutal and almost evil. That kind of fascinated me. I thought, 'What if I did a vampire story and brought those sensibilities to his character?' So, he's fighting against the vampires which I thought was a nice twist on the traditional thing where he's always the alpha vampire but bring those sensibilities and show that in his mind, the end always justifies the means. If he has to kill a thousand innocent people to defeat the vampires, he'll do it. In his mind, it's a worthwhile sacrifice.

KA: That's a very apt characterization of him, but I would say that some of the worst stories about him are probably specious. When he was locked up by Mathias Corvinus to and his half-brother, Radu who'd been the sultan's butt-boy took the throne to make peace with the Ottomans, some of the worst stories were circulated to justify his continued imprisonment. And, some historians think that, had many of them been true, Corvinus and the other Eastern European rulers would've never placed him back on the throne. I don't doubt that he was a brutal son of a bitch the whole thing with the Turks and the forest of impaled bodies comes to mind and that some of those stories are true, but a lot of them aren't well-documented. You're getting into the line between folklore and history.

WH: There's no question that a lot of his reported brutalities were propaganda from his political enemies. But, to the general public, because they were so brutal, that's what they think of. When I think of Vlad, the first thing I think of is that woodcut of him dining among the bodies of his enemies impaled in the background.

KA: No question, he was authoritarian and tyrannical. He was moral in his own twisted way, but he was probably not a nice guy by any stretch of the imagination. Trying to write about him in my own comic, IMMORTALS, is difficult, because it's hard to make him sympathetic. I'm utterly fascinated by him, but it's difficult to treat him as a protagonist because he's just on the cusp of being truly evil. It's only his intentions that make him even slightly relatable wanting to fight for one's homeland, for instance. Anybody can sympathize with that.

WH: And people who were in those positions of power didn't have to worry about appeasing the public like modern politicians have to. They could be total lunatics.

KA: They didn't exactly have the U.N. to answer to. There are moments when authoritarianism can be very effective, but it comes at a price. And, I don't think as a ruling model it's ever worked particularly well. If it had, you'd have more of them. Historically, it's always fallen over. To an extent, there is an inherent appeal in to authoritarianism because after a while, people want to cut through the bullshit and the bureaucracy with someone who will stand up and get things done. But, historically, a lot of people end up dying in the process.

WH: It always works that way. I don't want to give the impression that I think that's a good way to govern. I just think that, back then, those were the kind of people that ended up in those positions.

KA: Sure Vlad Dracul Dracula's father and his other son were murdered by the boyars. It's like rule passed through either succession or conspiracy. Anyway, you said you read the novel DRACULA when you were a kid. How much influence did the fictional narrative have on the story, versus the historical subject matter? I noticed in the first issue, the cargo ship Demetrius brings the Morrocan vampire to the United States, which reflects Dracula's journey to England on the Demeter in the novel.

WH: The Demetrius was the real ship that inspired Bram Stoker. It gave him the idea. In terms of inspiring my story, it wasn't much. DRACULA is pretty Gothic and romantic, and IMPALER is definitely not. But since I read it when I was a kid, it made an imprint on me. I've thrown in little homages like that for people that have the read the book. In the fourth issue, there's an homage to I AM LEGEND, when one of the characters stands outside the place where the survivors are hiding, yelling at them. There are little snippets here and there, but I tried to make the story as original as possible.

KA: And, not that it hasn't been done before, but making a story about Vlad the Impaler, rather than Dracula the vampire, hasn't been done as much. People often don't know how riveting the true story is as much as or more so than the Stoker novel. I always appreciate it when someone does their research and tries to depict the real guy. I suppose his initial appeal comes from sharing the name with a famous fictional character, but when you look into it, there's an exciting story there.

You mentioned DRACULA, the novel, as being Gothic and romantic. It's definitely a Gothic novel, but Dracula the character when he's even on camera comes across more like a sexual predator or a child molester than he does Gary Oldman or Bela Lugosi. I think people miss that he's a fiend in the book. He's not dapper or romantic, and not someone anyone would want to be around. I think a lot of filmmakers miss that. He's more like a fking pedophile than a Byronic hero.

WH: You know, I never thought about it, but it's actually true.

KA: I've spent an unhealthy amount of time focusing on that book.

I know IMPALER is an ongoing series, but how many issues will it ultimately run? Do you plan to work with the same artists throughout the book's tenure?

WH: I have it mapped out in my head to last 30 to 40 issues. And, hopefully, the book sells well enough to support the Nicks. I can't think of anyone else I'd want to do the book. They're both really gung-ho about it. If you look at their art now compared to their UNDERWORLD stuff, it shows they've grown a lot. I've seen some stuff beyond the first issue of IMPALER. It's just awesome and every page gets better and better.

KA: Do you want to entice CINESCAPE readers with what they can expect in the first couple of arcs of IMPALER?

WH: The main human character the cop, Victor is the moral center of the story. His past with his wife dying and his wanting to retire from the NYPD creates a lot of conflict between him and Vlad. To Victor, the ends don't justify the means. He's a former cop and he believes in justice. Victor is the counterbalance to Vlad's dictatorial tendencies. I don't want to divulge too much, but around issue 5 or 6, Vlad really cranks things up in terms of what he's willing to do to defeat the vampires. That brings the conflict between him and the survivors to a head. In a lot of ways, Victor and the other human survivors not only have to worry about the vampires, but they have to worry about Vlad. He's been in limbo for 500 years and he's an unstoppable killing machine. You have a person like that with a mindset that says, 'I'm going to do what I want, because what I say is right' versus people who were raised in a democracy. They're more concerned with themselves, insuring that they survive, finding others, and piecing together some semblance of society. Those things are really diametrically opposed. The other thing is that by the third issue, New York City is gone. Nick Postick is penciling a double-paged spread of vampires annihilating people in Times Square. By the end of issue three, there are a hundred people left in the city. I wanted to raise the stakes. This is the end of the world.

The Spinner Rack


By Al Brown and Kurt Amacker

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Dr. Dastardly: Implacable consortiums are my favorite!
Kurt: Have you considered polygamy? I hear they have it in Utah.

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Al: Featuring Mole Man.
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Kurt: And here we have one of the few things with an "X" in the title you'll catch me read (at least by Marvel). See you next week, kids!

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