Feature & Interview: David Jenkins (Vampires Of Hungary: The Holy Roman Empire)

Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Banging Life are very pleased to bring you a feature about David Jenkins’ upcoming comic book project Vampires Of Hungary: The Holy Roman Empire as well as an interview with the writer himself.

Vampires Of Hungary: The Holy Roman Empire is a horror comedy set in Medieval Hungary and follows the attempts of a priest and several knights to prove the Queen of Hungary is a vampire. It lauched on Kickstarter, March 31st 2018.

Check it out via Kickstarter here.

You can check out two pages of the comic below.

1. Hello David! Thanks for taking the time to speak with us. First things first, tell us a bit about yourself.

I write comics, screenplays, short stories, articles and reviews mainly in the spec fictions genres with some historical fiction thrown in for good measure as I studied history at Uni. Horror is my favourite genre though with the Vampire Lestat being my favourite book and Interview With The Vampire being my favourite film. I’m really looking forward to the Vampire Chronicles TV series as you can guess.

2. Tell us a bit about Vampires of Hungry: The Holy Roman Empire, what is it about?

It’s a horror comedy about a group of knights and a priest from the Vatican who travel to Hungary to investigate claims that the ruling classes including Queen Barbara De Cilli are vampires.

It will be a five issues series told in modern dialogue and has three different viewpoints- Arthur (the brave but depressed leader of the knights), Peter (a nervous knight especially around girls) and Barbara (a half blood vampire who tries to do the best for her country but is hated by many of her human and vampire subjects).

3. What inspired you to write a comic book?

I originally wrote Vampires of Hungary as a screenplay but the film industry is notorious difficult to get into so I was just sending out the script with no luck. Then one of my friends at our local writers group (Skelmersdale Writers Group) asked why I didn’t write comics when I’ve enjoyed reading them for over 10 years. I always thought it was difficult to write comics and get into the industry despite going so many comic cons as everything from a Minion to Spider-Man 2099.

My mate assured me it was easy to go from writing scripts to comics so several books, forums and a free online course from Making Comics I wrote a mini comic. After writing a mini comic I wanted to write something bigger but achievable so decided to adapt Vampires of Hungary as I already had the scenes, the characters and even some of the dialogue was suitable for comics.

Another big reason for me to write it as a comic was that it would be my own story with only the artist to compromise with as opposed to a film where producers, directors etc. have their own vision. The final clincher for writing Vampires of Hungary as a comic was that I could use several of the scenes I had cut from the film script as they would be too expensive to film.

4. Why Kickstarter?

For comics Kickstarter and Indiegogo are the big two crowd funding platforms but Kickstarter has had more comic projects funded and has the advantage that it’s only funded if you get all the pledge. This is important to me on my first comic project as postage from the UK to overseas can be expensive and I’ve heard enough crowd funding talks about how people have went ahead after only getting some of their funding target and it’s ending up costing them a lot of money to fulfil their rewards.

5. When does the project go live on the platform?

Saturday night 31st March.

6. Games, Brrraaains or Head-Banging? What’s your preference?

I’m not much of a gamer but I’m torn between brrraaains and head banging. Horror is my favourite genre of books and films but on an average day I spend more time listening to rock (everything from Frank Turner to Five Finger Death Punch). I’ll go with brrraaains at the moment although it depends on my mood.