Above you see a cover from the long running Elvifrance bande dessinée Jacula, with uncredited art. We picked this up from a Paris bouquiniste a few weeks ago. The backstory here is that a woman named Jacula Velenska is bitten by a vampire and, once turned, roams far and wide quenching her thirst for blood. She’s accompanied by her vampire husband Charles Verdier, and his dog servant Wolf. This is in French but the series originated in Italy as a fumetti, or adult comic book, and ran from 1969 to 1982 for a total of 327 issues, which strikes us as quite a lot.
Our French reprint is from 1971 and is 14 in the series. We were anticipating some foundational Jacula vamp action, but were surprised to discover that it deals almost entirely with a loup garou, or werewolf, named Charles, and how he ends up eating his own child and wife. At the end of the tale he encounters Jacula, who he captures and plans to kill before thinking better of it, for reasons that are unclear. It could be this is the same Charles that later becomes her companion. We’ll figure it out. One of the reasons we bought this was to practice French, which comes in handy where we live.
We said the cover art was uncredited, but generally they were painted by three guys—Leandro Biffi, Fernando Tacconi, and Carlo Jacono. Thanks to the powers of the internet we were able to determine that this one is by Biffi. The interior art by Alberto Giolitti is a bit more basic, which is usually true of comic books, but you’re buying these for the story, 112 pages of it in this case, written by Giuseppe Pederiali. We have a few scans below, and if you want to see more from Elvifrance, start here.
