Twelve Tribes Vampire Panel: Part 2

In part two of the Twelve Tribes Summit panel discussion on vampire literature and lore, the panelists talk about vampires in comics and in the church, and diversity in vampire literature.

SJ: Mr. Maberry, you’ve done some vampire stories that have been comics.

Jonathan Maberry: I’ve done novels and am just starting to write comic books. But, they’re not vampire comics yet. They will be.

SJ: Vampire lore seems to wrestle with these vampires having powers that people don’t have, almost powers that gods would have. And comics have that same time of bent with superpowered characters. Just out of curiosity, if it were Dracula vs. The Hulk in a cage match, who would win?

Jonathan Maberry: The Hulk. They actually wrote the Hulk into a corner by making him too tough.  Marvel actually had a Dracula comic for years and he even fought the Silver Surfer, which is pretty absurd. They do tend to play with the power level of vampires in the comics. One of the things I’m hoping to do is restart a Dracula comic with Marvel. I just started writing for Marvel and discussed it with my editor. I’m doing superhero stuff now, Wolverine, Punisher. But, I really want to get back to writing about werewolves and vampires for Marvel and they seem interested in that as they’re rebooting their horror line. It’s kind of separated out from the superhero line because superheroes are often too tough for the supernaturals. So, they do exist in the same world, but don’t travel in the same circles. There’s only one superhero character who really overlaps well is Black Panther, who is getting a huge reboot.

SJ: It can be comic book, it can be literature, it can be a commercial book. So, is that gold for you, Monique?

Monique Patterson: Yes. Within the Vampire Huntress Legend series alone, first we had novels, then it got optioned for a movie, and the next thing we’re doing is a graphic novel in the fall, then a manga. After that, we’re spinning off to young adult. The possibilities are really endless, not just because it’s vampires. The world that the author creates has to lend itself to that.

SJ: Historically, Dr. Logan, have those stories been told in different formats? The older stories seem geared toward adults. Are there old kids’ stories about vampires?

Dr. Logan: Not that I know of, and that’s not to say that there aren’t. Just that I don’t know of any. There are different publishing formats, like the book format that gets high circulation and is very expensive and there’s the periodical format where the author does serial installments. Some of those periodicals are high brow and others are aimed at more ordinary people. Those were called penny weeklies. There was a vampire story published in that format called Varney the Vampire. He was a really sweet vampire and he’d go around saying, “Isn’t it great to be a vampire!”

SJ: Sort of like Casper the Friendly Ghost. From a spiritual standpoint, Dr. Gaffney, how does the Church look on all this?

Dr. Gaffney: I am now of course going to speak for every Christian person on the entire planet. . .(laughs).

SJ: OK, what are some of the different viewpoints within the Church?

Dr. Gaffney: I teach Bible in a seminary for people who are preparing for ordained ministry of preparing to serve the Church, so I’m going to speak out of that context. When I teach Bible and I teach the place of this kind of myth, making a small inroad into the Book of Isaiah, we talk about how people make sense of their world in the same way Mr. Maberry talked about earlier. How do you make sense of the fact that babies die or women die in childbirth? What are the things that we hold fundamentally sacred? And however you understand sacramentality, human blood has a mystic power in virtually every culture. So how do we draw fences around that? How do we talk about how important and significant human blood is? If it’s positive in one way, then what are the negative aspects? So I think all of these types of literary constructions in religious settings enable common folk to make sense of their world.

But, there’s a secondary level, and I think it keeps clergy – and not just the Church, because it goes beyond Christianity – it keep clergy employed. I was thinking about your question to Dr. Logan, what are the physical forms of these texts that we have? The Babylonian texts that have survived are clergy texts. We know about these characters because they’re written in a prayer book in the sense of how to pray against them or how to ward them off. Other forms have not survived. We know theirs was a ritual culture, so there may have been stories for adults and stories for kids, but those haven’t survived. But, what was worth investing the time, energy, and money in – and it was a lot of money to make a clay tablet – was something for use by clergy in the exercise of their business. So there is a financial piece and a job security piece. When we’re thinking about something spiritual, all of our worlds are inter-related. There is truly no force that doesn’t have an impact on sociology or economics.

SJ: I want to stick with you for a moment, then I want to go to Leslie. One of your studies is women and the role they play in all this. What were the precedents in stories and Biblical literature that could be traced to vampires? I guess what I’m saying is, was there biting in the Bible?

Dr. Gaffney: Not in that sense. In the sixth century BCE, which was the time when Isaiah was writing, he talks about a particular land that has become so desolate that the only ones who live there will be screech owls, goats, hyenas. He names a long list of unpleasant characters and says that even Lilith will live there. So, when the land is good for nothing, then it becomes habitable by these creatures. That’s sort of the overlay with the Bible. What’s interesting to me is to ask the question, well Isaiah doesn’t explain this to his audience, so he’s assuming that they know what Lilith is and what she does. What was it that he knew and they knew that modern readers don’t know? At that time, he understood that it was a female creature and it was associated with darkness, night, destruction, and wherever Lilith and her brood set up was not a place for human habitation. In terms of biting, there’s all kinds of ordinary, regular biting like in fighting, but there is no supernatural biting. They like to scrap.

SJ: So, Leslie. You’ve been able to take this and put it in a context of your own. But you’ve taken it beyond that and incorporated some of what Dr. Gaffney is talking about. I remember one scene you read at the Harlem Book Fair where Lilith was in Hell with the Devil and they were scrapping. And she was losing. But you’ve been able to take all these things and put them in a different context. When we think of vampires, we think of something European, but you’ve been able to make it multicultural. What impact do you think that will have on vampire lore going forward?

LA Banks: It’s interesting because what I was trying to do is to say there are good people, there are not so good people, and there’s people in between, but it’s not like a person is this ethnicity or this religion and therefore they’re good or bad. I wanted to show hunters of all religions and all racial backgrounds. There are also vampires of all colors and cultures that appear in the book. The beauty of the vampire is that it could be anyone, your mother, brother, sister, cousin. It’s anyone who has the entity in their blood. I like that whole aspect. One of the biggest things I try to do in the books is show that you can have on a cross or a crescent or whatever you believe in, but if you don’t have the faith to back it up, my vampires will rip your eyes out. I want to take it out of the Euro-centric, Transylvania perspective and broaden it out to include everybody.

SJ: Going along in that vein, Leslie, we’ve just been through a big change in our country. In keeping with that change, what role do you think some of our new, or evolving, views on race demonstrated by Obama’s election will have on the literature?

LA Banks: My hope is when you see change, and change happens on multiple levels, so if people can open their minds and embrace change and elect an African-American man to the White House, then maybe it’s not such a strange thing for someone to go into a bookstore and it won’t matter what color the person on the cover is. That’s always a struggle as an African-American author, to be quite frank, because you have an image of the character on the cover and you don’t want people seeing that and thinking, “This book is not for me,” rather than, “This book is in a genre I like to read, so I’ll pick it up.”

I think one of the things that’s been so rewarding for me with the Vampire Huntress Legend series is if you look at the people who came out for this weekend, it was all age groups, all ethnicities, all religions. We have a very eclectic mix that has come to this series, but the series lends itself to that because it has characters of all ethnicities, religions, ages. The setting is right for this now, but still as an author, you have to create an entry point for people to feel comfortable coming to your work. Every reader wants to read themselves into the book. We all want to relate to the experience.

SJ: I think that ties in to some of what you were saying earlier, Mr. Maberry, about how these characters in these comic books work together now and the characters that you named were of different ethnicities. How do you see that moving forward in the literature of vampires?

Jonathan Maberry: I think it’s gonna be affecting a lot of areas of literature, and certainly genre literature. Hopefully it will be the same way people will start viewing history. Vampire literature for a long time was white. It was Dracula, it was Lestat. And now we have a rich diversity within literature and comic books. I had this discussion recently with one of my writer friends and one of the topics we were wrestling back and forth with was that as people begin looking for something to read, [unintelligible] we’re all facing this economic crunch, we’re all in the same boat. Every single person. The fact that we have the changes in our country, the first African-American president – I think he was elected as much for his integrity as for anything else. The fact that he’s also not the typical white president we’ve had for two hundred years is a bonus. The integrity and the richness of all the possibilities, now we’re all less afraid to reach out.

SJ: So, Monique, what’s going to be in the candy store in publishing as we move forward with more diversity?

Monique Patterson: I think you’re going to see more. I’ve been doing this for like ten years and my sister had this joke one time about black editors in publishing. She said, “You guys are like pepper in a salt shaker.” Over the years we’ve started to see that change. Doing books with African-American characters was hard until a certain point, and then when that door started to open then they wanted the same kind of African-American characters. If you tried to do anything different and didn’t have anything to back you up, it was “I don’t know, we can’t do that.” But, you keep pressing because you know there’s an audience out there.

You know that it doesn’t matter the color of the character as long as they’re good stories, then they’ll speak to people. One of the things I’ve been doing is trying to bring more of those stories to the table. Sometimes, I’ve gotten lucky and managed to slip something in there. Over the years it’s definitely gotten easier for me. You are going to more of this, though. I’m really excited, I think that it’s going to – I wouldn’t say that it’ll be a cakewalk – I think that some things may still be a little bit troubled because old habits die hard. But, I definitely see us moving in a direction to bring so much more variety to the table.

Look for the final part of the panel on Friday. Read part one here.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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