Got It Covered: 'Count' Reimagines The Greatest Revenge Tale of All-Time!
Jan 15, 2021
by Troy-Jeffrey Allen
“When I was about 17, I was at my local Blockbuster and came across a copy of the 2002 movie adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo,” artist-writer Ibrahim Moustafa recalls. “On the back of the rental box, there was a section that recommended similar movies, one of which was The Mask of Zorro, which was absolutely one of my all-time favorite movies. So, I rented The Count of Monte Cristo and was absolutely floored by it,” he adds before admitting that he also used to draw to an audiobook version of the original novel. “It's one of the classics and often mentioned in the same breath as The Three Musketeers.”
Before Old Boy or Frank Castle, the French and Afro-Caribbean writer Alexandre Dumas invented the action-adventure genre. His fascination with history, romance, and swashbuckling would produce classics such as The Man in the Iron Mask, The Three Musketeers, and The Count of Monte Cristo. 177 years after it was first published, Ibrahim Moustafa (High Crimes, James Bond) is giving the latter a sci-fi makeover in graphic novel form. The book is called Count (JAN211389), and it’s scheduled to be released this March as an original graphic novel, thanks to Humanoids.
In Count, instead of Dumas’ Edmond Dantès, the protagonist is Redxan Samud, an escaped prisoner that joins an anti-fascist resistance group. “I got to thinking: what if this were re-told in a different, more timeless setting, using more contemporary storytelling techniques,” explains Moustafa. “But in a way that also injects some action and swashbuckling into the intrigue inherent in the original story? From there it was just a matter of figuring out what that would look like, and how I would want to approach it visually.”
Part of that visual approach was designing and future-proofing Redxan and his cast of supporting (and opposing) characters. The final cover to the Count trade paperback features the key players in a Drew Struzan-like pose off. It turns out that the motivation for this image had a lot to do with upholding a tradition. “Humanoids has such a rich history of traditionally painted covers on sci-fi books. I wanted to try and continue that tradition with Count.” Outside of humanoid custom, the cover is very much a movie poster in that it highlights characters, locales, and actions found within the book itself. “I wanted the cover to be something that really gave prospective readers a taste of what they could expect from the interior art from the book. Count has a lot of scope to it, so it was important to me to try and capture some of that in the cover image,” he continues. “The biggest challenge was the composition. I knew that I wanted to include a lot of the visual elements from the book on the cover in a montage of images, so figuring out what to put where, and giving those elements a visual hierarchy was definitely a challenge.”
"Once I realized that I wanted to make comics, I dedicated my entire waking life to that pursuit," Ibrahim confesses. Not surprisingly, his commitment hasn't gone unnoticed. In 2020, Humanoids signed him to a rare three-book deal. The first of which is Count. Ibrahim has yet to reveal what his next project will be. For now, he's focused on the story that ignited his imagination at 17-years-old. The Count of Monte Cristo. “It was written so long ago, and so it's very much of its time,” he acknowledges before quickly giving Alexandre Dumas his absolute due. “It's such a timeless premise...I love revenge stories, and The Count of Monte Cristo is kind of the granddaddy of all revenge stories.”
COUNT is currently available to pre-order at your local comic shop. It hits store shelves on March 17, 2020.
Framed for treason and wrongfully imprisoned at the hands of a jealous rival and a corrupt magistrate, Redxan Samud escapes his hovering prison colony hell-bent on retribution. Given a map from his dying jail companion to the location of a stolen cache of Union Credits large enough to make him wealthy beyond imagination, Samud concocts a plan to exact revenge on those who conspired to let him rot in a cell.
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Troy-Jeffrey Allen is the producer and co-host of PREVIEWSworld Weekly. His comics work includes BAMN, Fight of the Century, the Harvey Award-nominated District Comics, and the Ringo Awards-nominated Magic Bullet.
