POSTSCRIPT

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A lovely princess, valiant knights to guard her, and a sinister and powerful foe bent on taking the life of the lady—I’m sure this setting from many medieval legends and fantasy tales is familiar to most of you. And this theme is just what I wanted to try my hand at this time out. Except here, everything is turned on its head. The lovely princess is a vampire. D is her sinister foe. And as for the secret ingredient—immortality.

In the famous Hammer horror film Brides of Dracula, the vampire Baron Meinster drags the lovely school teacher Marianne out in front of Dr. Van Helsing, whom he’s already bitten, and says, “Beautiful, isn’t she? What a pity such beauty must fade . . . unless we preserve it.” In the masterpiece that is Universal’s Dracula, Bela Lugosi’s Count delivers a line that’s quite sentimental and not at all what one would expect from a fiend: “To die, to be really dead—that must be glorious!” And near the finale of Christopher Lee’s last entry in the Dracula series, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the master vampire plans to destroy the world with bubonic plague bacteria, but Professor Van Helsing makes him wince when he asks, “Is this your own death-wish?” Apparently, the eternal life and youth humanity has always dreamt of isn’t necessarily so cherished by the vampires who possess it.

In his short story “Hail and Farewell,” Ray Bradbury paints a grim picture of the loneliness of a man who, due to his eternally youthful appearance, eventually becomes the object of suspicion and fear for those around him and must move on to a different area. However, that’s only the dark side of immortality as seen by people who will surely die. Unable to escape the absolute enormity of “Death”, people continue to long for life eternal, no matter how sad it may be. Given that, you can probably understand the final actions of this story’s heroine, Elena. In order to escape the fear of death, religions have been born and numerous other comforting concepts created. In the west, there’s Heaven. In the east, reincarnation. And although the existence of either has yet to be proved, they can’t help but make me marvel at the human mind.

I have some news that might interest fans of the Vampire Hunter D books in English. The comic Hideyuki Kikuchi’s “Vampire Hunter ‘D’” is scheduled to be released by Digital Manga on November 25th 2007, with illustrations by Saiko Takaki. In addition to the English version, there will be simultaneous releases in German, Italian, and Finnish. “D” is spreading across the globe. Cheers!

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Hideyuki Kikuchi

July 3, 2007

While watching Hostel