Forty Coffins – One Shot Comic

Writer: Rodolfo Santullo

Artist: Jok

First published: 2025

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: One by one they disappear. The ship Demeter is travelling from Romania to Whitby, England with a mysterious cargo of coffins. As the crew is beset by an horrific killer, the remaining sailors turn on each other in fear and paranoia. Only when it’s too do they realize their cargo carries the vampire Dracula.

Thoughts: When I reviewed Santullo’s The Passenger of the U-977 I mentioned this as a forthcoming comic. U-977 was, at its heart, a submerged retelling of Stoker’s Demeter sequence and it was interesting that Afterlight comics were looking to produce this also.

It is, essentially, a lift and of the sequence and Santullo has not really elaborated on the story as others who have created properties based on that short section of the novel have previously done. There are moments of expansion, of course, the crew is named, for instance, and there is a sequence where the Captain seems to have an encounter with Dracula’s vampire women, but they are more watery and part of a haunting dream sequence, rather than real. Indeed, there is a further sequence where he enters Castle Dracula in a dream and sees crew members impaled. This dream-taunting of the captain came across as a hetero-version of the dreams visited on the captain in the novel The Route of Ice and Salt.

The lower level of embellishment of the original sequence means that this fits neatly into a one-shot format and, after the opening landfall at Whitby, by remaining in the Captain’s point of view (via his logs) we see little of the vampire, he becomes more a threat ever present than a character we particularly see. The artwork is very comic-book orientated, working therefore for the format, though perhaps a little less evocative than that in U-977, but the narrative expression is much stronger than in that graphic novel.