The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

#DCRL

What's It About? 

In the waning days of the nineteenth century, strange events are beginning to play out around the English seaside town of Whitby. A schooner in full sail wrecks upon a reef apparently steered and crewed only by a dead man. A student at the prestigious Whitby Academy has an evening encounter with something unknown and begins to act strangely. And a large, black dog is on the loose, seemingly able to rend anything it encounters limb from limb…Academy students Mina, Arthur, Joe, and Quincey take note of these happenings and seek to understand them, but, as the writing on the wall says, the records have already been tampered with…

#DRCL midnight children has story and art by Shin'ichi Sakamoto. The English translation is translated by Caleb Cook and lettered by Brendon Hull. Published by Viz Media (September 19, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

It's impossible to overstate the influence Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula had on literary and popular culture. Yes, J. Sheridan LaFanu's Carmilla predates it by decades, but Dracula himself has become the definitive vampire in the popular imagination. From video games to sequels to spoofs, many texts have recreated Stoker's seminal tale, but few titles do as fascinating a job of being inspired by it as #DRCL midnight children. Hewing closely to the source text, this volume covers up to partway through Stoker's original chapter seven—and that it's so easy to look at Stoker and find that out is high praise indeed. Add in several incidental bits and bobs from Stoker's text, such as gravestone inscriptions, and creator Shin'ichiro Sakamoto may well have amassed the hundreds of pages of notes that Stoker did while writing.

Even with this fidelity to the source material, this is still very much its own story. Sakamoto's additions, however, are in line with the literary criticism of Stoker. For example, some critics read the story as sexually transgressive, with men experiencing penetration and taking on more passive roles in sexually charged bloodsucking. To this end, Sakamoto's decision to have Lucy Westerna be a transwoman is particularly interesting. Lucy's three suitors from the novel are all still present, but they call her by her dead name and function as knights protecting a monarch rather than lovestruck swains. Or do they? Some of the boys' language takes on distinctly chivalric undertones, and at one point, a comparison is made between Lucy and Guinevere of Arthurian legend. They seem to subconsciously understand Lucy as a girl even if they can't seem to vocalize or understand it, which is in direct contrast to Mina, who is fully aware of Lucy's female identity.

There are odd footnote choices; “catch as catch can” is footnoted, while the archaic nautical term “larboard” is not. (“Port” is more commonly used today.) Along with Lucy's trans identity, Sakamoto has also made a few more efforts to update the characters for a modern (and Japanese) audience, recasting American Quincey as Black and John Seward as Jo Suwa, a Japanese exchange student.

#DRCL midnight children will not be a story for everyone, and it does feel like it tries too hard in some places. But it also does more than its best to give us a new skin for this old tale, and the changes make it feel like more than just another Dracula story. If you're into Stoker, you do not want to miss this, but anyone looking for a good vampire story also shouldn't hesitate to pick it up.

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Dracula isn't exactly hurting for adaptations. Hell, #DRCL opens with its take on the last voyage of the Demeter and also features the character of Renfield, both of which received movies earlier this year that succeeded as sources of memes and not much else. Shin'ichi Sakamoto's take moves around some of the circumstances of how we come to follow the story and modernizes some of the characters in terms of casting, if not the setting itself, but otherwise sticks surprisingly close to the classic horror fundamentals that make the tale of Transylvania's most famous export so compelling. It's got the epistolary style of Stoker's original novel down pat, with prose narration related through competing and conflicting accounts of captain's logs, journal entries, and so forth. But there's a particular emphasis on recorded evidence as an aesthetic in cite>#DRCL, embodied in that conspicuous # symbol: a sign of onset modernity, and how that contrasts with unknowables from the past, like disease and superstition, which still stalk us.

As it encroaches on those theories, an appreciable amount is happening in #DRCL, almost too much for a first volume. The opening chapters aboard the Demeter succeed as pure horror before we pivot over to Mina and the others in school and how the onset of Dracula's shadow starts to affect their lives. There are compelling corners of Sakamoto's updated versions of these characters as we come to understand elements like Lucy's situation in this version. On that note, I admit some trepidation over presenting a presumably transgender character as being turned into some predatory, inhuman creature. On the other hand, there's an alternative reading there regarding timely societal pressures and how we treat ourselves, others, and desires designated as taboo. As a first volume, it's worth waiting to see where it goes. Besides, I quite like Lucy otherwise, her unabashedly freaky indulgences, including an implication that she may be down for the Count.

That depiction of the big D himself is the feather in the cap of Sakamoto's stunning art. As a truly unknowable creature, an impermanently formed entity, Dracula brings a whole new level of literary respect to his name each time he appears here. But beyond that, as glimpsed in the bizarre and fundamentally strong horror imagery aboard the Demeter, the art is effective across the board. Sakamoto is a master at using full spreads, and page turns for dramatic and horrific effects. It comes through particularly strongly with the instant page switches in the digital version, though Sakamoto's finer art can look a little thin and washed out on screen. Still, #DRCL is worth checking out. It's arresting as a horror story and a character piece, it's goth as fuck, and it makes a Dracula adaptation feel fresh, a feat in its own right.