Five-Legged Iguana

 ALAMAT: ORIGINS

[Addendum 2] (1 of 3)

In prepping ALAMAT: ORIGINS, Budjette Tan conducted a trio of Q&A's with me covering AVATAR, HORUS, and DHAMPYR.

Some of the Q&A content made it into the story Intros in ORIGINS.

Most, did not.

So I'll be posting the Q&A's here, uncut, so you can all see what was left on the cutting room floor.

First up: DHAMPYR.

1 For new readers, what’s your pitch that would get them interested In DHAMPYR?

 

You’re a half-human, half-vampire hybrid, who’s become quite adept at hunting down those blood-sucking freaks.

But you’re really looking for one freak in particular: your father…

Family reunions can be such a pain in the neck.

 

2 Aside from Vampire: The Masquerade, what inspired you to create these characters and that world of vampires?

 

As you’ve noted, Vampire: The Masquerade (and by extension, White Wolf’s World of Darkness RPG universe) was the main inspiration for DHAMPYR.

A key inspirational element here was the Vampire campaign I ran with a group of players that included none other than Carlo Vergara himself. DHAMPYR’s setting (that very particular Goth-drenched San Francisco spectacularly brought to (un)life by Oliver) was also influenced by that Vampire campaign.

 

Beyond that RPG inspiration, I also wanted to write about family dysfunction, and I felt that if I could write something fantastic, where you could actually strip away all the genre markers (the vampire/occult stuff) and still have a functional narrative (a son trying to come to terms with an absentee father and the wreckage of his family caused by that person), then I could possibly have a story worth telling.

 

3 If you created Dhampyr today in 2024, do you think you would end up with a different set of characters, a different layout for the world?

 

Interesting question.

Two ways to answer that.

 

One: if, for whatever reason, the specific idea for what eventually turned out to be DHAMPYR came to me today, it would then be a period piece, in that, there’s something very particular about the Goth scene in the ‘90’s, when the ‘80’s (and Goth’s “birth” in the late 70’s) were still a recent memory, before the drift of certain elements of the subculture towards the mainstream (see: emo).

 

So I can’t quite see that DHAMPYR narrative set in the present day, without having its, ahem, fangs filed down, certainly from a visual/aesthetic standpoint.

So the story we told in DHAMPYR, characters and all, would still probably be set in that time frame.

 

The other way to answer your question: if a general idea came to me to write about a half-human, half-vampire hybrid in the year 2024, that story would definitely not be the story we told in DHAMPYR, but another beast entirely…

I highly doubt that it would have that Goth aesthetic, either… so, at the very least, the characters wouldn’t look the same…

 

4 What do you remember from the night the book was launched in Synergy, during Halloween?

 

That sea of PDBs (People Dressed in Black).

So awesome.

:D

So there you go.

After all this time, I am still extremely proud of what Oliver and I were able to achieve with DHAMPYR.

The fact that DHAMPYR was the title that made the Manila Critics Circle establish a Comics Category is still both mind-blowing and humbling for me. Sure, we didn't win, because the Circle has a rule that the voting of the judges needs to be unanimous for a book to be considered a "winner", but that doesn't take anything away from the reality that DHAMPYR was the inaugural title for the Circle's Comics Category.

It broke through the ceiling.

Boom. 

The next Q&A (probably HORUS) should hopefully go live over the weekend?

If you have any questions about DHAMPYR, please feel free to leave them in the Comments section and I'll see what I can do to answer them.

you can't drink just six,

Dave