michael--you should be grateful that most of the personnel of the series were absent from the Gold Key comics... given that Certa's attempts to render Quentin, Julia, Stokes et al. resulted in some really unspeakable caricatures... Quentin always looked like a bad cross between pop star Engelbert Humperdinck (who I believe hailed from Tasmania) and the WB's Tasmanian devil... sigh.
I have just read issue 1 of the Dynamite DS comic--excellent work over all! Given Liz's terse reference to David's "pyromania," I would guess that a certain former Mrs Roger Collins may be lurking in the shadows, or should I say, the embers...
I don't see the Julia or Carolyn episodes as references to the 1991 series, personally, but I did catch two visual references that may possibly be a nod at Depp Shadows--[spoiler] in the scene of Carolyn driving out of the estate, the gateway her car drives through looks *a lot* like the gateway for Collinwood created for the new movie (we never saw the Collinwood gate in the original series)--and when Barn vamps out on Julia, not only does he bare his fangs, but he sprouts Fu Manchu fingernails, too, just as Depp does in the new feature[/spoiler]
Of course, the inclusion of these images could be coincidental, but given the delay in the book's production, the artist may well have seen these photos--or may even have been shown material from Depp Shadows before some of it was made public...
I don't see these references as attempts to somehow incorporate this story into the canon of Depp Shadows--which, by the accepted standard definition of canon, will have ITS OWN canon, not somehow an extension of the canon of the original series (which is CLOSED). These books, the Dynamite series, will also establish their own canon for the story of Collins family, the curses they suffer, Barnabas et al.
G.