Then we get the pencilled pages, eventually they go to Vittorio, who is colouring the book. So, Aditya does a rough lettering pass through the thumbnails, and they go back to Summit. Because everything is on a grid, we have to be really careful about how dialogue is placed, and how much room there is, and if all the panels have enough room for the art and the text to sit beside each other. Sumit gets it and does roughs - thumbnails really, which go to the letterer, Aditya. I send over the script, obviously it begins with that. For instance, it’s really difficult to transmit someone being passive aggressive in a comic, so when the Indian Prince is in conversation with the Nobleman, and the Nobleman says ‘I’ve been made to feel at home’ and the Prince says ‘have you now?’ That expression on that panel is really hard to do well in a comic book but Sumit nails that each time.

As for what Sumit brings to the book with his art– obviously the quality is amazing, but his strength is getting characters to act, which I think is really important with this comic. So, that continues to be one of the most interesting bits of collaboration of the book. There’s this page where he reverses the reading order for three panels, and another page where he’s essentially taken three wide panels but split them into nine. My concern was that is was going to be restrictive for Sumit, but he’s found very interesting, very cool ways to take that structure and play with it. RV: Well, I’ve worked with Sumit before on “Ruin of Theives” and really the most striking thing we did here was we put the whole story on a grid, not necessarily nine panels, but you can see the underlying grid on every page. You have some brilliant collaborators on the new book, what do they bring to the table and what does the process of collaboration look like for you?

It begins with a European vampire travelling to India, on one of the first East India ships, but when he arrives there, he encounters legends and monsters, some of them far weirder, far older than he is. Ram V: “These Savage Shores” is a story about vampires and colonialism set in the 1760’s on the Malabar coast in what is now modern day India. So you have a new book from Vault Comics, “These Savage Shores,” before we talk more, can you summarise what the comic is about?

Savage shores comic