Art and story: Shin'ichi Sakamoto
First published: 2025 (UK)
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: Dracula meets manga in this surreally beautiful and chilling retelling of Bram Stoker’s quintessential horror classic.
In this beautiful, evocative, and often surreal retelling of Dracula, a fearsome enemy comes from the east, bringing with it horrors the likes of which have never been seen in the British Empire. Standing opposed are Wilhelmina “Mina” Murray and her stalwart companions, united in a cabal that eclipses gender, nationality, and station until the day that they can achieve victory.
The nature of time, reality, and fantasy intertwine as Jonathan Harker’s ill-fated journey to meet with Count Dracula begins. Traveling through strange, foreign lands, a young boy will confront unimaginable terrors that his short time in this world could scarce prepare him for. Yet even after escaping the fearsome beasts and ghosts of the wild, he will find within the stone walls of Dracula’s castle terrible monsters waiting to devour him all the same.
The review: Time bends in this volume, the fourth in the #DRCL series, as the cliff-hanger from Volume 3 is left to hang, with the vampiric and insect bodied Lucy looming over her erstwhile classmates, and the series moves back in time to Jonathan Harker’s travels through Europe to meet the Count. As the series has transformed many of the characters into adolescents, we see Jonathan as a very young boy forced to travel, we discover, by the Headmaster at the Whitby school to secure his place. Interestingly the character is a wheelchair user, having been pushed in front of a racing horse in a cruel prank.
More interesting is what is done with Dracula artistically. We have seen him as a slender, beautiful man (in a typically Shōjo manga style) so far, in this we see two forms – one based on Vlad Ţepeş and the other as a young girl with Nekomimi (cat ears), which is the form Harker first sees him in when he arrives at the castle. This gender queering is also marked by the fact that Dracula is still referred to in the masculine by Harker (though Dracula refers to himself in the plural) and the visitor does actually note the ears, wondering if they are real of affectation. The enter of your own free will moment is made sadistic by having Harker forced to fall from his chair and pull himself in on his smashed legs, couched in wonderful psychodramatic memories and hallucinations, with the Count impassively observing until holding him, almost tenderly, once over the threshold. The bride sequence is notable for the fact that the vampire women have a racial diversity and the fact that , despite Harker being portrayed as a rather young (almost cherubim) boy, there is definitely a more sexual aspect (with Dracula calling them lechers) and this might prove a trigger for some.
Also interesting was the very deliberate use of a Möbius strip within the art, which fit into the idea of a narrative time shift and paired nicely with portraying the castle as an Escher staircase. The whole volume is concentrated upon the visit to the castle, with flashbacks to Harker’s past also. This series continues to enchant. 9 out of 10.
In Hardback @ Amazon US
In Hardback @ Amazon UK
4 comments:
Wow. This sounds wonderfully disturbing.
Hi Zahir, it really is. I am captivated by the series.
Always good to hear from you
I really love this manga. I looked up reviews to see if anyone liked it like I do and I'm pleasantly surprised to find your reviews. I bought the JP copies and caught up to the raws of the manga and can only say that somehow, for me, it continues to get better and keeps me immersed and mystified. I'm excited to read about how you feel with the future volumes, because Shinichi Sakamoto is establishing and exploring new & higher potentials for manga as an artistic medium.
Side note: I hope that, if you haven't already, you reread the previous volumes, because it's pretty rewarding. In the first volume, there's some cool stuff with the handwriting/initials from the letters Mina receives and leaves you questioning who is potentially impersonating who. The dates mentioned and the small sentences at the beginning of each volume are also important for both the plot but mainly the characters perspectives; there are cool clues to understand if characters and their recording of events are being a reliable/unreliable 'narrator.' Sakamoto also uses illustrations metaphorically to convey concepts, senses, and feelings. For example in the first volume when they opened a crate, a pile of dead bodies in a double page spread was shown just to make the reader have an idea of the scent.
Anywho, I hope you have a good day/night and I'm glad you've enjoyed your time with the series thus far!
Thanks for stopping by Matthew and for your comment.
Thanks for the revisit idea and I am sure there is plenty missed that will come out through multiple reads and inform each future volume. I'll see if I can get opportunity to read through again before the next volume.
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