Day 17’s cue word for #Inktober2020 is “Storm.” #Inktober
So with the cue word “Storm” my brain immediately went to the character from the long-running X-Men comic book series and the movies directed by We’re Not Supposed to Say His Name Anymore. The thing is, I do not like the X-Men character named “Storm.”
It’s weird. I thought she was a fine character, even if her powers were kinda odd. She had a good back story, and interesting arc. Then around the time that they made her the leader of the X-Men when Scott “Cyclops” Summers stepped down, the writing for her character took her down an odd route. It’s almost as if the creative team felt it necessary to change her character to “be a leader,” despite the fact that her depiction up to that point justified her being a leader in the first place!
In short, they changed her character and it didn’t ring true. As a result, I didn’t like the character anymore. It’s also unfortunate that the same time period marked a bunch of messy story arcs that never meshed like they should have, so I guess the baggage of not liking where the story overall went added baggage.
Given all that, I depicted the closing leg of the Demeter’s troubled voyage as it unwittingly brought Dracula to England. I love the book Dracula by Bram Stoker and have read it every couple of years since college. I love most of the movie adaptations, flaws and all.
One of the things I liked in particular in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the onscreen depiction of the horrific voyage of the Demeter. It culminates in a horrible storm that guides the ship into port and provides cover for Dracula in an altered form to invade the unsuspecting town.
It’s one of my favorite parts of the book, too. Since everything is a compilation of journals and logs, the log from the Demeter is particularly eerie. When I later saw a documentary that said Stoker was sickly and rarely/never traveled, his ability to build the reality of Transylvania and the trip of the Demeter is extraordinary.
So that’s how “Storm” brought about this picture. It’s pretty fun to trace my thought processes like this. It’s more personal than I’ve been on the blog in awhile, and it feels good to get back to this place. I do hope people enjoy it.
You should be used to the disclaimer by now: If you like it, great. If you don’t, that’s fine too. I’m just trying to put it out there for the sake of putting it out there. I still need new pens.
If you want to learn about Inktober, here’s the site: Inktober.com.
kessel korner 