Ricardo Delgado brings us VAMPYRE: A COSTA RICAN FOLKTALE
- Luis Godoy II
- 7 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Ricardo Delgado drops by to chat with Luis Godoy II about Vampyre: A Costa Rican Folktale, from Clover Press, available through Kickstarter until Friday, February 13th.
COMIC BOOK YETI: Hello Ricardo Delgado, and welcome to the Yeti Cave. You’ve worked on movies such as Apollo 13, The Incredibles, and Men in Black, and you’ve created comics such as the Eisner-winning series, Age of Reptiles (Tribal Warfare, The Hunt, The Journey, The Body, and Ancient Egyptians) published by Dark Horse, which is where I would imagine our readers would know your work best. You’ve also done an illustrated novel called Dracula of Transylvania. That is a lot of work across different media!
RICARDO DELGADO: Thanks, I’m kind of a jack of all trades and a master of none. I’ve had a varied career and am proud of the stuff I’ve done, yet I look at it now like I learned a lot from many folks much smarter than myself. I went to the best film school in the world in the sense that I was around some of the great filmmakers in the business, and listen to them assemble a crew, run a team, then have it all come together to make a feature film. I also then learned the so-called Disney Animation style of storytelling, which was (and is) all about crafting a story from a place where the best idea won out, wherever it came from. These philosophies and workflows may have contrasted with each other: one stressed everything originating from one auteur, while the other being an aggregate of thoughts put into an animation production pipeline. Yet either way, in the end it was all about story, story, story.
CBY: With all those credits said, we’re here to talk about your latest creation, Vampyre: A Costa Rican Folktale, which is now on Kickstarter through publisher Clover Press – find the Kickstarter page here. So, what brings you back to the world of illustrated novels?
RD: The illustrated novel is in my opinion the next step in the evolution of the Creative, and while it may sound like hyperbole, I took the idea of concept art and applied it as a format to my novels. Certainly I’m not the first to do this, look at Jim Gurney’s magnificent Dinotopia books! They’re incredible and combine his ability to both write and illustrate his concepts, and I think that’s the way we’re gonna go heading forward, in my opinion.
CBY: In your last novel, you tackled the world of Dracula, the world’s most famous vampire story, and now you return to the form with Vampyre. Does Vampyre connect to Dracula, directly or indirectly, at all?
RD: It does expand the world of Dracula of Transylvania, yet there’s not a direct connection. What I wanted to explore was the idea of asking, what do the other nosferatu of the world do when they are not around or in service of the King of the Vampires? I was really pleased as to how the first novel was received, the expansion of the supernatural world around Dracula, and thought a smaller scale yet very complex story would do the trick. Technically, this story takes place in 1948, which is decades after the events of DoT, yet the broader theme here is that the evil of Dracula attempts to spread all over the world.
CBY: Being of Costa Rican descent, why was it important for you to set a story in Costa Rica, and how are the cultural myths of the locale included in Vampyre?
RD: Exploring one’s own history is everyone’s ultimate story, in my opinion, so combining the expansion of the Dracula of Transylvania universe with my own personal ancestry was really appealing. I was really inspired by Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft’s New England, as well as Montague Rhodes James’s turn of the century England, so humbly attempting to capture the flavor and mood of my parents' homeland was one of the early influences, and honestly, Costa Rica does have a really interesting, magical vibe that combines the daily life with the supernatural. You see crosses in ballparks, statues of saints in stores, and folklore everywhere. I just saw this all as unexplored territory, and I hope that readers do too.
CBY: When did the idea of Vampyre come to you, and how long have you been working on it?
RD: A lot of it came about during my research for Dracula where I read as many vampire myths and legends as I could, and then I thought, “Hey, how can I share Costa Rica’s magical folklore?” I also was really intrigued by the notion of creating a different kind of shapeshifter nosferatu. In my story, initially there’s a raven form and a cat/dog thing form that my vampire transforms into, and as I was designing I hit upon the idea of utilizing some of the species in Costa Rica as versions of the raven and cat/dog thing, and I hope everyone enjoys them.
CBY: Artistically, what kind of feelings are you trying to convey with the illustrations in Vampyre, and how do you hope they strengthen the prose portions of the novel?
RD: Certainly the feeling of dread, the idea of something in the gloom with hot-coal eyes reaches out at you. I was also after a strong silhouette with the creature designs, with spots filled with details, in a way forcing the viewer to look at a particular shape in general, then to look deeper into the details. A sense of mystery was a mod I was trying to convey as well. Ever been walking along a dark street, and a shape in the distance that could be a dog walking at you? But for a split-second you think it might be something else? Like that. Also, all of the great creature designs have a secondary or even tertiary gag associated with them. Think of all the armaments that the Predator has, or the acid-for-blood of the Xenomorph. I remember watching Creature from the Black Lagoon as a little kid and marveling at the gills opening and closing. That kind of stuff is what I wanted to inject to my vampire concepts for this project and think they all look really intriguing. A few surprises as well :)
CBY: Beyond the short portion available in the Kickstarter page, “A small town's struggle in the face of a series of brutal murders perpetrated by a monstrous thing of the night,” what can you say about the story for interested readers?
RD: 1948 was an interesting year in Costa Rica. There was a civil war over a contested election, and the struggle played out over Easter Week, and that kind of ‘story intersection’, if you will, is the stuff that writers find irresistible. Once I had that, I knew I could tell a story during that time period, and all I needed after that was the supernatural element, which of course is where the vampire comes in. There’s also a lot of local historical details and context both on a personal familial basis and a broader cultural exploration that I really ran with, so the story is really packed with those kind of details, but it really is a story about how a small town handles the nightly feeding of one of the undead.
CBY: In comparison, to what other stories is Vampyre tonally similar?
RD: There’s a wonderful short story by M.R. James called "An Episode of Cathedral History" that I like a lot. Among ghost story scholars it’s debated whether the story has an actual vampire in it, but that’s one to check out. Another one is "The Salem Wolf" by Howard Pyle, who was an amazing artist during the so-called Golden Age of Illustration. He came up with a couple of beautiful paintings for his short story as well. Think of The VVitch meets The Howling. Lastly, the biggest influence on this story was a book called Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King and Bernie Wrightson in the 1980s. I saw that book at Crown Books (remember those, everyone?) as a struggling Art Center student back in the day and hadda snatch it right up, despite how it affected my 1980s Velcro wallet!
CBY: Where can readers find you, other than the Kickstarter page?
RD: Oh, I’m around. Find me on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Tiktok. The usual places for the usual suspects, to paraphrase Claude Rains in Casablanca.
CBY: Thank you, Ricardo for your time and choosing Comic Book Yeti in covering your book.
RD: Thanks, Luis, it was a blast!
CBY: This was Luis from Comic Book Yeti, signing off with another interview from the Yeti Cave. Be good, do good, and read comics! Find me on the CBY discord or BlueSky @luisgodoyii.bsky.social.
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