While artist and designer Ricardo Delgado is well know for his Age of Reptiles‘ dinosaurs, he is starting to get a reputation for creating vampires as well.
Coming off of Dracula of Translyvania, Delgado revisits the vampire in another part of the world in his Vampyre: A Costa Rican Folktale book (now available to back on Kickstarter). His latest hardcover edition includes over 200 pages of art, historical maps, creature designs, and photos of actual locations from the story, both past and present.
We spoke to Delgado once again about his new project in our exclusive interview with the artist.
Coming off of your Dracula project, what made you decide to explore another vampire tale in your new novel?
Ricardo Delgado: There’s a photo of me when i turned five years old, and I’m in front of my birthday cake, and on that cake are a bunch of 1970’s rubber monsters, lol. I’ve always loved monsters, is my point, lol. This project grew out of my experience with Dracula of Transylvania as well as my own Costa Rican ancestry. There’s a lot of magic down in Costa Rica, and I wanted to harness some of that, combine it with some history, art, folklore and try to tell a unique, compelling story both in my writing and art.
You have said that Vampyre: A Costa Rican Folktale is part autobiographical. How so?
Delgado: Well, the town in Costa Rica in which my story is set is the town my parents grew up in. It’s a small town called Alajuela just north of the main international airport, but as a kid my mom told me a lot of ghost stories from Alajuela, from La Llorona (the Crying Woman) to La Carreta sin Buelles (the cart without oxen), and I just fixated on all of those stories. I grew up in Los Angeles, so those stories felt very real and very mysterious to me. I also wanted to tell the story of my parent’s hometown during the 1940’s as a way to capture all of their experiences for my now-grown children to know and read about. And lastly, just the idea of tossing one of the undead into that scenario was too fun to resist.
How would you compare a classic European vampire to the one in your new story?
Delgado: I did a lot of research on vampire myths, legends and folktales for Dracula of Transylvania. There’s a really cool English ghost story by M.R. James called “An Episode of Cathedral History” that has been interpreted as a vampire story, and of course there’s the seminal stuff like Stoker’s masterpiece and Carmilla, yet I had not read about too many set in Latin America much less Costa Rica, so I set out to tell one. I would say that for all of the horror fans out there, I really admired Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King and the immortal Bernie Wrightson as a college student, and if there’s a template for this book, it’s that magnificent story.
You both write and illustrate the novel. What was your experience writing the novel as opposed to a comic?
Delgado: My approach was the same as with my Dracula story, and that is to create concept art based on the story after I’d written it. Concept art is what I’ve done for most of my career, and wanted to take a production design approach to my illustrated novels, at times designing different versions of the same character/prop/environment, and I hope readers enjoy my methodology.
For example, on Star Trek: First Contact, I designed many different variants of the Borg Queen, as did other artists, and I wanted that process to feel realized with my versions of the vampire in this story, in its many forms. The novel itself takes place over a week’s time, with each day a chapter in the story. This book also takes place during a civil war that was happening in Costa Rica during that week in 1948, a fact I ran across early in the process and I just ran with it.
If you were to do another project on another type of supernatural creature, which one would you choose?
Delgado: Ooooh, great question! Maybe a mummy story? Would love to see a mummy story told over the centuries, as civilizations around him, her or they rise and fall. Or a werewolf? I would say that if you are into werewolves, The Salem Wolf by Howard Pyle is a great read. It’s basically a short story version of The Witch, but with a Lycanthrope.
Any surprises for the Kickstarter campaign in terms of special editions, premiums?
Delgado: Yes! Lots of cards and goodies coming up, I’m really excited about this one, a unique project and think readers will get a real kick out of the historical meeting the supernatural.
Upcoming work?
Delgado: If you go to my Instagram page there’s my upcoming science fiction spy story Warhead, also coming soon from the good folks over at Clover Press. This one’s ambitious, but Warhead is another big, bold step into another genre or two, hope everyone’ll be on the lookout for that as well!
Vampyre: A Costa Rican Folktale is available to back on Kickstarter right now.
