You Go, Ghoul!

How does he find the time? When not working on Doom Patrol and the upcoming Blood of the Demon, John Byrne came up with this concept, which struck him while signing comics in Calgary:



In 2001 I flew up to my old home town of Calgary, Alberta, for a visit with my parents and a College reunion. I also set up an appearance at one of the local comic shops. Between signing comics I doodled on some scraps of paper, and as I did I found myself thinking, for no apparent reason I could detect even at the time, about the old Universal movie monsters I'd grown up watching on the Late Late Show. I doodled a Karloffian Frankenstein monster. A mummy. A vampire in the Dracula mold. Then I started thinking about female versions of these. Almost immediately the ball started rolling, and within a couple of minutes I had drawn some preliminary sketches of characters and jotted down a few story ideas. Before I was done, I even had a title.

When I got home to Connecticut I decided not to let this float around in my head, and took a week off from my regular work to commit the concept to paper. A 24 page story emerged, in regular comicbook format. I offered this to a few publishers, but my lawyer was never quite satisfied with what they had to offer -- he is notorious for never taking "Yes" for an answer -- and when the idea of producing a webcomic for ByrneRobotics.com was lofted, I wondered if it would be possible to "cut and paste" scans of the pages into a more web-friendly format. Not only was it possible, some of the pages even looked better that way!

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