Comics and Graphic Novels take inspiration from many sources. Leah Moore and John Reppion, who have been writing comics together since 2003, have recently been mining classic literature to create unique adaptations for Dynamite Entertainment. Originally serialized in comic-book form, these series will ultimately be collected as graphic novels. We spoke to Moore and Reppion about their current projects, which include The Complete Dracula and The Trial of Sherlock Holmes.

BookShelf: Could you give a brief description of the Dracula and Sherlock Holmes series? How did these projects come about?

Leah Moore: The Complete Dracula is our adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel with the inclusion of some elements excised from the book, and only included (until now) in the author’s notes. We have re-introduced the “lost chapter”, "Dracula’s Guest" as a prequel/introduction to the main story. Again, it’s a five issue series but there are 32 pages of story in each issue (more than 160 once the whole thing is collected).

The Trial of Sherlock Holmes series is a brand new Holmes mystery over five issues, with art by Aaron Campbell. Dynamite asked us if we would like to do a Holmes story and we suggested creating something new that would be in the style of Doyle’s originals rather than adapting an existing story. It’s not been the easiest thing in the world but we’re very proud of the work we’ve done – I think it really pays to push yourself sometimes.

BookShelf: With Dracula, you are dealing with a direct adaptation of a classic, while with the Trial of Sherlock Holmes, you have created an original story using classic literary characters. In both of these approaches, how do you decide what to focus on from the source material and where to take creative liberties?

John Reppion: Dracula is a single unit – the whole thing is self contained and what’s begun at its beginning is ended at its end. Our wanting to adapt the novel as faithfully as possible is as much a reaction to the fact that no-one seems to have done it before as anything else. The Count has become this classic monster but Stoker’s tale has been diluted and rewritten so much that there are a lot of people out there who don’t know the original story. And it’s a really good one! We just wanted to try to bring that story to a new audience and keep it as close to the original as we could.  

With Holmes on the other hand you’ve got fifty-six short stories and four novels written by Doyle in which a further hundred or so cases are mentioned but not fully detailed. On top of that you’ve got many very faithful and enjoyable Holmes stories written by other authors. Unlike Dracula, Holmes and his adventures have not suffered quite so much corruption over the years (giant pipe and deerstalker notwithstanding) – many of us are already familiar with some of the tales thanks to radio plays, TV series and so on. We felt like there was enough room for us to have a crack at writing an original, faithful Holmes mystery of our own – one that would fit into the canon without disturbing or contradicting anything. Most of Doyle’s stories are written from the point of view of Dr. Watson who acts as Holmes biographer. It’s clear from some of the details that Watson includes in these stories that names, places, etc have sometimes been changed to protect the innocent (names of people who Holmes has allowed to escape justice such as in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” for example). What we wanted to do was focus a bit more on the “real” world outside of Watson’s chronicles showing what might take place outside of those books.

BookShelf: What can you tell me about Alice in Wonderland? Will this also be a straight-up adaptation or an original story? What audience are you hoping to reach?

Leah Moore: We are still at the planning stages with this project, but we are hoping to make it as faithful an adaptation as we did with Dracula. We will have a bit more room, so hopefully we can adapt it so it can fill the space we have and use all the verse in the book, rather than paraphrasing it. I’m not entirely sure how it’s going to come out yet, but I can’t wait to get started on it. It’s really exciting to get the chance to put our mark on such a classic.

BookShelf: What does the comics medium bring to these works? What do you need to keep in mind when translating from prose to comics?

John Reppion: There is an awful lot of dialogue in Doyle’s Holmes stories which is why I think people have found them so easy to adapt for stage and screen. Getting the dialogue right is the main key to getting Holmes right really – the interplay between Holmes and Watson is definitely key.

The fact that Dracula is an epistolary novel means that the story is told from several people’s points of view and, although much of it is very descriptive, there is still some room for interpretation and conjecture. We treated the story as if Stoker formulated his novel from the diaries and papers left by the characters and, rather than just having access to the novel, we have also had access to those original papers. This means that nothing which happens in our version contradicts Stoker's or vice versa but you might see or "hear" some things in slightly more (or less) detail. The nature of the comics medium means that we sometimes needed to show things that the novel only hinted at. We wanted to make it a true companion volume to the novel so that the two could be read side by side but there are, of course, some things we had to handle differently.

With Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the actual narrative of the story is very dreamlike – we drift along though a series of bizarre events and scenes. The key thing to retain is really Carroll’s wordplay and poetry while trying to capture the general atmosphere of childlike wonder and dream-logic in our descriptions for the artist.

BookShelf: Do you think that readers who come to your series as comics fans will be inspired to read the original books? Along the same lines, what might devotees of Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle enjoy in your adaptations?

Leah Moore: Hopefully they will find the comics familiar when they read them. They will hopefully not get too tripped up by the new format, and just be able to follow the story along, and enjoy the visuals. I think comic fans will be inspired to read the originals, because novels can seem really dry and lacking in atmosphere, but if you have the images from the comic in your head when you go to the book, it might help people get into it, help them visualise what’s going on.  I am really looking forward to seeing what the Doyle fans make of our Holmes story as we have tried to put in all the best elements from all our favourite Holmes stories. One of the main problems with what we are doing with it is that it’s a serial, not one story, so I hope the character translates into the serial format okay.

John Reppion: In terms of our own works which devotees of Dracula might enjoy – There's usually a horror element to our series so fans of Stoker’s horror writing might enjoy our zombie series Raise the Dead or our Dynamite Top Cow crossover The Darkness vs. Eva – Daughter of Dracula, which has its fair share of vampires. Doyle fans might enjoy the crime elements of Darkness vs. Eva as well as those of our other crossover mini Witchblade – Shades of Gray – which features our own take on Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (albeit in the style of the Witchblade universe).  

BookShelf: You have an established collaborative partnership. How do you divide up the work? When working with artists, are the artwork and script created separately or is there more of a back and forth dynamic?

John Reppion: Our process is incredibly longwinded really – we break an issue down into a list of numbers (representing pages). We briefly describe what happen on each page and add that to the list. We then sit down and discuss each page in detail and Leah draws them out in rough. The artist never sees these roughs however – we divide those pages up between us and then type them up into our script. Sometimes we dialogue as we’re going along but often we leave that until the whole rest of the script is written. We each read through the whole thing and make whatever tweaks or changes we see fit and then we’re done. I think a lot of people assume that because we’re two writers working together we should be able to work twice as fast as one, but in reality, because of the depth of detail in our scripts (typically one and half to two pages of Word document for one page of comic book), we probably work a bit slower than a lot of other comics writers.

It’s always nice to have some back and forth with your artist and both Aaron Campbell (Holmes) and Colton Worley (Dracula) have been very open to discussing the scripts and ways to handle certain things. They’re both incredibly talented guys and have definitely brought plenty of their own ideas to the table. We’ve been really lucky getting such capable, intelligent people to work with on these projects – we try to pack a lot of reference into our scripts but with both Holmes and Dracula there was still lots of research to be done to make sure things were correct. Both Aaron and Colton have really risen to the challenge.

BookShelf: What makes the original works “classics”? Are there any others you’d like to tackle in the future?

Leah Moore: I think a classic is a book which has continued to give people pleasure tens or hundreds of years after it is written. Dracula is still frightening all these years on, Holmes is still full of suspense and wonder, if it still works, then it’s a classic.

Other books are too numerous to mention really, I am an avid reader, so I would obviously love to adapt many different books. I had a suggestion from a friend recently to adapt The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien which I think would be astonishingly hard but very very funny.

I would love to adapt something like Catch 22 with all the period detail and the political machinations. I would love to have a go and some of the really old classics, like Aristophanes or Euripides, because I studied classics at university and the stories have lots to teach us even 3000 years after they were written.