My EXTREMELY LATE Halloween Comic – inspired by the Vampire of Lugnano. Feels good to work on some personal stuff, and it’s been ages since I’ve drawn a horror comic.
FOLKS FORGET ABOUT CARMILLA AND HER WONDERFUL LOVE STORY JUST BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T GET AS MUCH PUBLICITY AS OL’ DRAC BUT SHE’S AWESOME
SHE DOESN’T BURN IN SUNLIGHT BUT DOES WEAKEN CONSIDERABLY TO THE POINT OF FAINTING AND NEVER WAKES UP BEFORE NOON (MY SPIRIT MONSTER IS CARMILLA YO) AND WHEN SHE FEEDS FROM LAURA IT’S ALWAYS FROM HER LEFT BREAST. THAT’S STRAIGHT UP VICTORIAN EROTICA YO. SHE CAN TRANSFORM INTO A CAT AND INTO FOG, SIMILAR TO DRAC, AND HAS THIS LONG, BEAUTIFUL DARK HAIR.
YOU CAN READ THE WHOLE THING ONLINE IT’S OUT OF COPYRIGHT AND STUFF BUT HOLY SHIT A STORY ABOUT WOMEN IN THE 1800S THAT PASSES THE BECHDEL TEST WHAT????
GO. READ IT. IT’LL TAKE YOU BARELY AN HOUR AT MOST.
But what about vampire history teachers. Vampires who read something from a text book then proceed to light the book on fire and throw it out the window because “No. that’s not even close to what really happened. Listen up nerds I’m about to teach you what really happened in France during the revolution”
I need this as a series
Vampires sharing the recipe for Greek fire.
Vampires speaking in dead languages.
Vampires being able to translate untranslatable scripts.
Vampires who react to straightwashing historical figures like “Are you kidding me everyone knew that man was queer!”
Vampires from cultures who were once antagonistic towards each other stubbornly maintaining a friendship that’s lasted longer than their civilizations.
Vampires who honour forgotten deities you won’t find in mythology books.
Also, vampires who secretly saved stuff from the Library of Alexandra.
A vampire show that does not revolve all around sex and eternal cursed love.
nerd vampire whose knowledge of current events is terrible but they can always remember everything that’s considered “history” so they have a super-detailed knowledge of everything up to about thirty years ago and then ?????
vampire who couldn’t tell you what caravaggio was known for but duelled with him at least three times and slept with him at least ten. “cara-who OH YOU MEAN MICHAEL yeah he was cool”
vampire who spent 100 years in a convent and is still so bitter that in all that time they never made her mother superior “GODDAMMIT I HAD SENIORITY! I HAD SENIORITY!” “okay so first off janet, that was six hundred years ago, but more importantly, maybe if you didn’t always start those complaints off with blasphemy…”
vampire professor who just sort of showed up at oxford when it was founded and is still there (and nobody’s noticed because he still never actually shows up to his lectures)
vampire politician who lifts all their campaign speeches wholesale from speeches given 200 years ago and just waits for someone to catch them out (nobody ever does they’re prime minister and their approval ratings are through the roof)
WAIT I HAVE MORE
queer vampire who constantly talks about the fashion for straightness and you need to be really careful because if you tell them straight is default they WILL scream at you for five days straight about what a modern concept heterosexuality is
vampire hoarder who has an entire town where they just kept having to buy new houses to keep their stuff in and some of it’s probably worth tens of millions by now but you’ll never find it in among the 1950s kitschy kitten sculptures and boxes of newspaper (the newspaper is a wonderful mix of yesterday’s guardian and daily courants from 1725)
vampire sailor from manderville’s time who just has so many stories and some of them might even be true
vampire bluestocking girl who took to the internet like a fish to water and spends her whole unlife engaging reddit antifeminists about women’s rights because that’s one fight she’s determined to see through. also with the advent of cheap dyes she literally wears blue socks every day and hopes one day someone gets the joke
vampire doctor who just gets SO CONFUSED about the literature because do you know how hard it is to keep up with medicine kevin? when i got my doctorate we thought leeches were good and then they were bad and now they’re good again? i was published in issue one of the lancet kevin that is 387 lancets kevin how the hell am i meant to remember which one’s current kevin why are they saying cannabis is good for pain like this is news??? (but also lives in a state of wonderment every day in hospital because wow look at all this stuff we can do now look at it kevin!)
entire coven of vampires constantly quibbling over manners because they’re all from different periods: “HATS OFF AT TABLE” “SCREW YOU LEONARD ONLY PEASANTS EAT BAREHEADED” “TABITHA THAT HASN’T BEEN GOOD MANNERS SINCE THE 1500S NOBODY HAS LICE ANY MORE” “IT ISN’T ABOUT LICE LEONARD IT’S ABOUT GOOD MANNERS YOU NEED TO HAVE GOOD MANNERS WHEN YOU HAVE PEOPLE OVER FOR DINNER” “I SWEAR TO GOD TABITHA IF YOU MAKE THAT PUN ONE MORE TIME I WILL SHOVE YOUR STUPID HAT DOWN YOUR THROAT”
vampire musicians who might not have been child prodigies but goddammit 500 years of practicing an instrument is bound to get you somewhere (also knowing the composer and being the first person to start playing a song doesn’t hurt either)
my favorite will always be vampires who know fuck-all about the standard major historical events because they were always somewhere else whenever big shit was going down:
“yeah i heard about the hundred years war but i was in northern african at the time so…”
“the roman empire fell??? how did the fucking roman empire fall??? i spend a fucking handful of decades in india and i come back to this???”
“russia needs to stop having revolutions, i can’t keep them all straight…”
“when did france become a democracy?? and america’s now it’s own country??? i’ve spent the last century in a forest in wallachia scaring small children so––wHat dO yOU meAn we’re calling it romania now??? when the fuck did it become romania???”
“WE HAD A WORLD WAR??? WE HAD TWO WORLD WARS???? well obviously ‘world’ is an exaggeration because i heard nothing about it while i was lost in the amazon rainforest for the last fifty years…”
“listen i spent most of the fourteenth century as a pirate in the south china sea so someone’s gonna had to clue me in on all this ‘black plague’ nonsense.”
Imagine one of those vampires that spent a few decades napping and now they’re trying to catch up as best they can so they’re in a library looking through years of old magazines and overhear some middle-schooler discussing her project about the moon-landing and they’re like “WHAT!!!”
“You have to tell me everything about this!!!”
A confused but enthusiastic sixth-grader unfolds her trifold poster board and tells an absolutely captivated 3000 year old man-eater about the space race.
More like “I LITERALLY HAVENT EVEN GOTTEN THROUGH THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA PLEASE TAG SPOILERS”
I’M!!
“Have you gotten to Franz Ferdinand being shot yet?” An Austrian Vampire, angrily looking up from a ninth-grade history book: “are you FUCKING KIDDING ME??”
“yeah you know…lincoln doesnt get reelected” Vampire: “well why NOT he seems perfectly capable and oooh…oh…”
FRICK
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH
“So, you know pluto isn’t a planet, right?”
*Vampire chucks astronomy book written in 1994 at the person*
Imagine the vampire asking people who killed JFK and they’re all like ‘no one knows’ and the vampire just sighs and says ‘ok I know I said no spoilers but this is just getting ridiculous. someone tell me.”
imagine a vampire who’s absolutely mad about having missed a very specific moment and not really caring about the big picture searching for the one history nerd who might know when that outrageous lipstick they loved was put out of commerce, what happened to that minor theatre company debut, a forgetten artist’s they loved fate, if their friends ever did marry, what happened to that family lineage/where are the heirs now, /what happened to that one small hungarian village who was basically only some houses and mud where the heck did my village go/
I honestly would trust people on Tumblr to make a Vampire YA novel that is not the same old gross romance/psuedo romance bs that plagues the genre right now.
I’M SERIOUS y’all should just take back the Vampire Genre.
I don’t know what this is or why I wrote it but *tosses in*
“All I am asking, is where can I find my village. The man I talked to previously said that the inner web knows everything. So you should be able to find it, yes?”
vampires getting the urge to be intimate w/ their partners while feeding is so fucking funny to me… like imagine you’re just sitting there eating soup but getting REALLY into it? you just. want to fuck, b/c of the soup. want to fuck the soup
kinkshaming vampires
It makes sense, I think, once you understand that the modern version of vampires started by English gothic literature are all about sex, metatextually, and that fans of vampire lit(obvsl stuff like The Strain takes it in a different direction) implicitly understand this. Let’s deconSTRUUUUUUUUCT!
Like, I haven’t read Stoker myself, but from how everyone adapts it and from what people who have read it say/write about it, it seems pretty obvious that a big part of it is tiresome British anxiety over “white women” having sex with “swarthy” Eastern European “foreigners”. Carmilla is an equally obvious and iconic expression of anxiety over both female sexuality in general and women loving women in particular.
Then there’s the cuckold angle to vampires. They sneak into houses(or, in more obvious cases, are invited by the women themselves while the men are unaware) and have intimate interactions with women who don’t “belong” to them under the noses of the men who they do “belong to”. Humans are natural xenophiles; most of them(secretly, neurotically, or otherwise) are titillated by the idea of both promiscuity in general and “alien” people having sex with people they also have sex with in specific, regardless of how monogamously and patriarchally they live their lives. And are equally titillated by the idea of having, possibly secret, sex with those “aliens” themselves, obvsl.
Then there’s the blood thing. Not to get into it too deeply, but women are socialized to be ashamed of “blood”, and to associate it with pain, corruption, adulthood, sex, and pleasure. Vampires don’t just like “blood”; they need it to live. The very aspects of female biology and sexuality women are brought up to think are shameful and disgusting -and encouraged to alienate themselves from- are vital, nourishing, and desirable to vampires. So vampires don’t just play into the conventional pain/pleasure association around blood and sex through feeding, they do so specifically by bringing the whole food/sex/nourishment/satiation/exhaustion thing into it. And in a way that doesn’t erase or valorize the objectification and exploitation of women; while usually rejecting the common “sullied” and “broken” virginity narrative in favor of one where feminine sexuality is life-giving and pure, the vampire is still, literally, parasitically eating up the life of the woman after all.
Basically, vampire-eating ain’t about eating, friend. It’s kinks all the way down. Becuss of the sbymbols.. The symbols hol dall the power.
Fun Vampire Fact; the reason that Vampires traditionally cannot see their reflections in a mirror is because mirrors used to be backed with a reflective layer of silver — which, as the metal of purity, would not ‘interact’ with Vampires, who are the Devil’s work.
However, modern mirrors have used aluminum as their reflective backing for many years now — and aluminum is not a ‘picky’ metal at all. So Vampires are able to see their reflections in modern mirrors.
All I can think about is a vampire used to not seeing their reflection in mirrors for centuries, and one day they are just walking along and unknowingly pass a mirror backed with aluminum and THEY NEARLY SHIT THEMSELVES.
just moving along like everyone else 