Horror Icon Bela Lugosi's Incredible Life Story Is Now A Comic — Check Out Some Exclusive Art

It's been 90 years since Bela Lugosi portrayed the titular Count in the classic 1931 film, "Dracula." Lugosi's performance as the most famous of all vampires helped establish the character's iconography — his suave demeanor and vampire vords — and he would forever be identified with the role. However, in addition to Lugosi's professional triumphs onscreen, he had his share of personal troubles offscreen. Some of those will come into focus in "Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Dracula," a forthcoming graphic novel from award-winning cartoonist Koren Shadmi.

Published by Humanoids, "Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Dracula" is a biography that "chronicles the horror icon's tumultuous personal and professional life." This isn't the first time Shadmi has tackled a screen icon of the black-and-white era. His last project for Humanoids was the 2019 graphic novel, "The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television," which, as its title suggests, zeroed in on the creator and host of "The Twilight Zone."

Below, you can see an exclusive excerpt from "Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Dracula," which shows how Lugosi' success attracted loan requests from friends. ("Can you spare a thousand dollars?") His career decline eventually left him in a hospital, unable to pay his bills because he had not appeared in any union films for the Screen Actors Guild in over five years. (Starring in low-budget, non-union Ed Wood films didn't count.)