"Vlad the Impaler" by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon (Illustrator)

First, a word from the publisher: “From the bestselling author illustrator team of the “9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation” comes the truly gory tale of the historical Dracula. The Dracula myth has sparked a legacy of endlessly entertaining creepy tales. The fictional character, originally penned by Bram Stoker, was inspired by and named after a real-life fiend-Prince Vlad Dracula, the fifteenth-century ruler of Wallachia – a man infamous for massacring and impaling his enemies. In brilliant four-color illustrations, Vlad the Impaler tells the ghastly prince’s life story from his seizure as a boy by the Turkish Sultan, to his love life, to his maniacal attempts to retain power regardless of whose throat he must slit.“

What Worked For Me:

The art is technically proficient, and was evocative of the Silver Age of comics (despite being published in the late 00’s).
I’m not well-versed in the history and lore of Vlad Dracula, but the story seemed grounded in reality at least.
The work is short enough to complete in one sitting, and that’s precisely what I did.
There’s truth in the publishers advertising, as the work includes the, “”gory details and torture tactics,” of Vlad’s reign. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I also can’t say I didn’t see it coming.

What Didn’t:

For the most part, I found that the combat scenes lacked weight and felt flat. The work seems content to compensate with copious amounts of blood and a large body count, but that hardly piqued my interest. (If I was to be generous, I could say they were evocative of the painted battle scenes of the period, but this is a tenuous claim as the style only appears in large-scale battles.)
The formatting of the comic was weird. I read the work on a tablet, and each page was surrounded by a large black box instead of taking up all of the tablet’s screen. While I had the option to click on and zoom into each page, this seemed like an unnecessary step.
In the final pages of the book, it is revealed that the narrator was Dracula, the fictional vampire Vlad inspired. This felt tacky in a book that otherwise seemed historically grounded.

Conclusion:

I picked this one up in honor of spooky season but left disappointed. More than anything, I wish the story had more to say than, “historical bad man is bad.” It could have re-contextualized, re-imagined, but instead simply re-told. In that way, perhaps my expectations were the issue, as the creators’ other works clearly focus on the graphic novelization of history. That doesn’t change that I won’t be returning to this work, however.

Check it out here.