Talking ‘Vampyrates’ With Fred Van Lente And Luca Pizzari

Setting sail in July from Boom! Studios, Vampyrates sees writer Fred Van Lente and artist Luca Pizzari introduce readers to the Night Isles and the vampire pirates manning its ships. With colors by Adam Guzowski and letters by Jodie Troutman, for more on the series check out this interview with Van Lente and Pizzari below:

Rachel Bellwoar: Merging vampires with pirates almost runs the risk of being too much of a good thing. Where did the idea of bringing the two worlds together originate?

Fred Van Lente: You know, it is very much a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup thing — two genres that go great together. (The vampires are definitely chocolate.)

Luca and I had enjoyed doing Weapon X over at Marvel together and wanted to come up with a project so we could keep on working together. We met up here in Brooklyn, where we both lived at the time, and pitched a couple ideas at each other, but nothing really stuck.

Then, out of the blue, Luca, looked at me and said, “I have this idea, but it’s really just a title right now: Vampyrates!” and we were off to the races.

Luca Pizzari: “Too much of a good thing” is actually a genuine worry I had going into this book! Me and my wife have this recurring joke about what we call the “Treasure Planet Syndrome,” where Disney years ago made an animated feature film of R. L. Stevenson‘s Treasure Island — but for some reason somebody during that process thought “hey, pirates alone are not cool enough, so let’s make this in space!”

I thought that maybe having pirates, and vampires, and alien worlds could be too much or look like an attempt to “be cool” at all costs, but when I suggested the word “Vampyrates!” to Fred he frickin’ nailed the concept and setting, so all my worries in that regard disappeared very quickly. I honestly never considered this book as a historical/period piece, to me the key work has always been “pulp,” and I think that the pirate, horror, and weird space opera parts really place it in a sort of Amazing Tales, 1920s pulp magazine landscape, and that stuff’s right up my alley!

Bellwoar: When coming up with the mythology for your vampires, were there any rules you knew you wanted to play with or stay away from (like with regards to reflections, appearance, etc.)?

Van Lente: That’s a great question. Very early on, we decided this isn’t Earth, this is a world where vampires are the dominant species. Their own religion, the Last Communion, is the dominant one, so a lot of the religious weaknesses aren’t there — no crucifixes, they cast shadows and they can see themselves in mirrors, because they have “souls.”

Luca was insistent on red eyes, which is a great look, and while they can’t turn into bats or any other kind of animal, they can transform into mist at will, something our vampyrates use in swordfights quite a lot, as you’ll see. When you opponent can suddenly materialize behind you — or above you — that affects the whole fighting style.

Pizzari: I love that by simply setting the story in a different world we automatically freed ourselves and our characters from most of the common vampire lore you see in movies and books. The turning into mist is probably the only link to traditional vampire qualities we have (apart from sucking blood, obviously) and I like using it in action scenes because I think it looks very cool visually.

That said, I have to confess that the red eyes thing is mostly because I always wanted to draw Gambit back at Marvel, but it never happened, so now Every. Goddam. Character. in this book has Gambit eyes!

Bellwoar: Nira and her cousin’s feud gives off some Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots vibes, especially with the religious angle. Do you take a lot of inspiration from history?

Van Lente: Ah, that’s a great point! Some of Sister Duchess’s elaborate headdresses are very Elizabeth-esque, now that you mention it (crossbred with Bram Stoker’s Dracula).

I love the Age of Piracy, and my first professional writing job was an Age of Sail CD-ROM game (yes, a CD-ROM game, I am old, shut up) for the Mystic Seaport Museum of Connecticut, so while this book has vampire sharks (yeah, I said it), thousand-year eclipses, giant spiders, ghost typhoons, and a whole of bunch of awesome spooky insanity I can’t get into now for fear of spoilers, we actually trying to get the ships and how they work right, even in a fantasy context.

Pizzari: Yeah, the headdress is a direct nod to one of my favorite movies ever, Francis Ford Coppola‘s Dracula with Gary Oldman, no further comment there.

I can’t talk too much about the historic angle in the story because that is mostly Fred’s department, but what I can say is that I spent quite a lot of time researching visual references of eras that we had decided our alien vampyrate society mostly looked like – and then proceeding to mix and match them. My ultimate visual goal was that of a 1960s Hammer Horror movie set in the 1600s-1700s instead of the more usual Victorian period (I absolutely adore Hammer movies).

That, and the phenomenal aesthetics of a videogame from some years ago called Dishonoured.

Bellwoar: Already in issue #1, we get some battles on the high seas. How has it been getting to work on action sequences like those?

Van Lente: They are huge fun to write. There’s a big sea battle basically in every issue! And, like I said, I did a lot of research on how sea battles actually work, and it’s been fun to take historical stuff — like, I read a lot of Herman Melville‘s pre-Moby Dick stuff, which is high-seas adventure like Redshirt and White Jacket, you know, like all the hot comics writers do — and it’s fun to take the historical stuff and extrapolate from that into our dark fantasy world. Like, our cannon all has these elaborate gargoyle mouths, and instead of walking the plank, Captain Akeyo makes her enemies “walk on daylight” — you’ll see what that’s like. It’s pretty gruesome.

Pizzari: Compared to drawing superheroes punching each other in the face, I found the swordfights in this book way more challenging because of how different the choreography is in terms of spacing the actors: when Wolverine fights an enemy, they’re all over each other, but if you introduce swords in the equation then you have to account for the space it takes to swing it and from which direction and stuff like that.

The actual sea warfare scenes are great fun to draw but I soon found they’re also very time consuming, so I’m always begging Fred to limit the scope and scale of those for my own sanity — so far, to absolutely no avail whatsoever!

Bellwoar: Then there are the fashions. Do you have a preference between the clothes worn at court and the clothes worn by Akeyo’s crew?

Van Lente: Luca has crushed it with the outfits. I am going to have to say the court costumes, because though they are way more elaborate and heavier, they likely smell way better. Akeyo’s crew probably smells like seawater and bloodstains. I mean that as a compliment.

Pizzari: Thanx, Fred! I always liked designing characters and their outfits, it’s really one of my favorite aspects of my job. I have to say, I actually vastly prefer Nira’s pirate outfit over the more elaborate official ones. But that’s mostly because I designed a very complicated wedding dress for her because I really wanted to milk the “wow” effect and the glorious weirdness of our initial royal gothic vampire alien wedding. Little did I know she was supposed to wear it for the whole issue 1 and the beginning of issue 2, and I will only say that drawing all those tassels flying around (her dress gets absolutely annihilated very early on) got very old very quickly… 😉

Bellwoar: Speaking of Akeyo, what kind of captain are they and is there anything that sets the V.M.S. Abyss apart from other pirate ships?

Van Lente: Akeyo is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. She was driven to piracy by an injustice done to her by the ruling Vampirium, and she plans on breaking the back of that Vampirium by any means necessary. Nira falls into her crew through circumstances I won’t spoil here, but let’s just say while they begin at odds, they may figure out soon enough they have a common enemy in Sister Duchess, who has seized Nira’s throne.

Pizzari: My initial notes for Akeyo to Fred and Seb (our editor — Hi, Seb!) were simply “she is vampyrate Grace Jones“. I remember seeing her in an old James Bond movie and every time she was onscreen you just forgot about everyone else and just wanted to know more about her. That is what I wanted with Akeyo. I’m always drawn to characters who have very personal reasons for doing what they do, and Akeyo definitely has got some unfinished business — of the bloody, revengy kind — that drives her.

Also, designing her crew was so much fun, they’re like the Doom Patrol of the high seas — not a single normal person in the whole ship.

Bellwoar: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Fred and Luca!

Vampyrates #1 goes on sale July 8th from Boom! Studios.