Vampires in Comics: Transformation of the Myth as Represented in "30 Days of Night" (Vampires from the perspective of an art educator)
Abstrakt
This paper discusses the transformations of 'the vampire myth' as represented in the comics '30 Days of Night' and compares it with Bram Stoker's Dracula, focusing on images of love, friendship, fear, terror and leading monster characters striking fear and uneasiness into readers hearts. As Gregory Bateson said, 'we think in terms of stories', therefore, there are presumptions that in the stories we encode in a form of signs our desires and wishes but also fears, frustrations and anxieties.
A mythological story, considered either as a system of communication or a structure, is a kind of a cipher referring to certain meanings or symbols helping us understand the deeper layers of our thinking and acting. Thus modern vampire myths could be also seen as symptomatologist's encyclopaedias of human fears, weaknesses and anxieties, from which citizens of a modern world are suffering.
All the symptoms and signs are presented in the modern myths with one intention - to question our own identity, identity of the most problematic existence, which is not called a vampire but the human being. Taking into consideration Barthes' and Lévi-Strauss' theories on the transformation and continual evolution of the myth, it is interesting to compare what has been changed and where this unforgettable myth is heading.
These transformations are closely related to changes in the modern society, fighting its everyday visible or invisible 'monsters'. However, preserving the vampire myths for centuries and making them more visual than ever, in the forms like comics or films, forces us to ask ourselves a question "What does it tell about humanity and a modern man?"