Dracula Has Risen From The Bullpen

In honor of Halloween, I thought I’d look at Marvel’s horror line from the 1970’s, specifically, the flagship of that line – the longest-running, and most respected, Tomb Of Dracula.

To backtrack a bit: at the beginning of the decade, DC had started to score with a series of new or revivified horror/mystery anthology titles: House Of Mystery, House Of Secrets, (Tales Of The) Unexpected, et al.  Part of what made this possible was a loosening of the comics code, which now allowed the long-banned use of classic monsters and some G-rated grue.  DC’s so-called “mystery” line is worth a story itself, and some day I’ll write one.  But for now, suffice it to say, DC pounced on the chance and hit paydirt.

Needless to say, as they had done in `61, Marvel looked at DC’s success and quickly moved to do their own version of the same boogie, launching a bunch of horror anthology titles.  Unlike DC, Marvel’s all flopped.  This too is a story to be told, some other time.

Undaunted, Marvel also took a stab at horror comics with continuing characters (DC had also scored with The Phantom Stranger and Swamp Thing, after all), and thus unleashed what was essentially their own take on the classic Universal monsters roster: Frankenstein, a mummy, a werewolf, and not one but two vampires – Morbius, the Living Vampire (a sci-fi vampire who had done a few turns in Spider-Man’s titles), and the granddaddy vamp of them all, Count Dracula.

As usual, Jack Kirby had the idea first:

Jack had this idea to do a book called Dracula, which he thought was going to be very commercial. His idea was to do Dracula at different time periods, an anthology book. One story might have had him in the present day, one story might have him in the past, another would have him in the future. He made the presentation to DC, and Carmine said, "Yeah, we'll get to it, we'll get to it." Then Marvel announced the same idea [with Dracula Lives!]. (Mark Evanier, reported by John Morrow in Jack Kirby Collector 13)

Whether Marvel got wind of Jack’s Drac book, or came up with the idea themselves, regardless, Tomb of Dracula hit the racks in April `72, with a story by Gerry Conway and art by the very fine Gene Colan:

ToD 1 is a fun little romp that pretty well illustrates the pros and cons of the title from its inception.  Frank Drake, an American playboy and son of wealth has blown his family fortune, and his down on his luck when his bud Clifton points out that the old diary, the one written by one Prof. Van Helsing, that’s in Frank’s possession, is the clue to a potential goldmine.  You see, Frank Drake is, in fact, a descendant of the famous Count himself, and there really is a Castle Dracula in Transylvania, and Frank Drake owns it.  If they were to restore the old bat trap, turn it into a tourist attraction ….Off go Frank, Clifton, and Jeanie, the girl Frank stole from Clifton, to Transylvania….

Which turns out to be straight out of a Universal or Hammer film, complete with 19^th-century-style village and villagers, and even a horse-drawn coach ride to Castle Drac, in the midst of a storm (of course the villagers tell them not to go.  Of course the carriage driver leaves them out in the storm to walk the rest of the way to the castle, cuz he won’t go near it). 

So, stumbling around in the castle, which is all kinds of spooky and full of (of course) bats, the three get separated.  Clifton falls through some rotted floorboards into a crypt, where he finds Drac’s stake-impaled skeleton, resting in a coffin. 

Now Clifton, assuming that this is merely the remains of some poor sucker who fooled the local populace into believing he actually was a vamp, and got a stake through his heart for his trouble.  So what does Clifton do?  For absolutely no explicable reason, he pulls the stake out!

This, it turns out, is all it takes to bring Drac back to death, so to speak.  And soon the ol’ Count is all over the castle, terrorizing Frank and Jeanie.  And, despite Frank’s desperate and not-entirely-believing-at-first efforts, Jeanie ends up vamped.

So, you can see, we have, as I said, a fun little romp in the Universal and Hammer mode, with some nice, atmospheric artwork, and, frankly, a pretty healthy dose of the preposterous (why in god’s name would Clifton have pulled that stupid stake out?  Why does Jeanie fly off instead of vamping Frank at the end?).  I’ve seen worse starts.

Issue 2 carries on, with Drac and Jeanie trailing Frank to London (where he’s run off, taking Drac’s coffin with him.  Apparently Gerry hadn’t studied his Stoker, since Drac always had plenty of coffins).  There’s some nice business with Drac stalking early 70’s London, of a sort I would have liked to see continued (Drac actually tries to pass himself off as a normal, albeit eccentric, contemporary man.  This approach was later abandoned completely).

The issue ends with Jeanie staked and Drac fled, after another confrontation with Frank.

#3 is the series first milestone, as new writer Archie Goodwin introduces the all-important supporting characters, Rachel Van Helsing – descendant of Prof. Van Helsing, obsessed vampire hunter, and hot babe; her mentor, Quincy Harker, son of Jonathan and Mina – bound to a wheelchair loaded with Bond-ian vampire killing gadgets, and Quincy’s good right arm, the silent Hindu giant, Taj. 

It also introduces a regrettable, all-too-frequently-recurring trope for the series – the Big Showdown, in which Frank, Quincy, Rachel, and Taj (or some combination of some of the above), confront Dracula.  This inevitably leads to the following scenario: each member of the group attacks Drac, one at a time (the idea of all ganging up on him at once is apparently to strategically sophisticated for this bunch), while spouting tiresome variations on statements such as: “you may think I’m just a weakling, but this time I’m going to kill you, Dracula” (Frank) and “this time you will not escape, evil one!” (Rachel) and “this is our final battle, this time, Dracula!” (Quincy).  Fortunately, Taj, being mute, is spared such a speech.  Drac, meanwhile, knocks them around, inevitably spouting variations on: (to Frank) “spineless jellyfish, how could you be descended from me?!?” (to Rachel) “cold-hearted witch, your crossbow will not help you!” and (to Quincy) “old fool – this time I will finish you!” 

This scene is repeated throughout the run of the series.  Inevitably it goes nowhere – Drac always bails uninjured and never manages to do any serious harm to his opponents.  The “this time it will be different” speeches they keep making at each other quickly become comical through repetition.

Gardner Fox held the writing reins until issue 7, and then it was taken over by Marv Wolfman.  Now Quincy worries about his age, and wonders if he hasn’t wasted his life, having spent the entirety of it hunting Drac.  And silent Taj turns out to have a horrible secret – a son of his own back in India under the vampiric curse.  As for Drac himself, he turns out to be the most complex and interesting character of all – a sinister, ultimate narcissist, convinced of his own rightness and superiority, yet despite all his selfishness, Drac turns out to have other parts to his personality.  Oh and lest I forget, Wolfman also introduced the knife-wielding Blade, a character who would prove very popular (though I myself never cared for him).
Wolfman has written just about every title in the Marvel canon, as well as devising a few of his own.  He has written many comics – some have been quite good; a few have been embarrassingly bad.  Wolfman’s writing on the title has been praised to the heavens, but it is not without its flaws.  Prose-wise, it was consistently very good.  The characterization was very strong.  Wolfman shared, in fact, probably improved upon, Stan Lee’s concept of fleshing out characters by giving them believable, relatable motivations that worked no matter how absurd the context.  Thus, he began to put meat on the bones of these characters.  And what was notable was that they were deeply flawed characters; deeply troubled people.  Frank Drake was tortured by feelings on inadequacy, constantly trying to prove he was something more than a pampered, broke playboy.  Rachel is so driven to kill Drac that she had nothing else to live for – not even her alleged love for Frank. 

Still Wolfman made several mistakes.  Early on, he established that Drac had been alive and active throughout history.  Pretty soon it seemed there were very few years that Drac hadn’t been up and drinking.  This rather undercut the whole concept of his being revived at Castle Dracula (he hadn’t been dead more than 4 years, tops, in 1972).  Making Drac that easy to kill and revive rather cheapened the whole thing.  Also, many of Wolfman’s early issues suffer from some truly dumb plot turns.  This reaches its nadir with issue 19 (“Snowbound In Hell”) in which Drac and Rachel are stuck in the midst of a blizzard in the Carpathians after her helicopter crashes.  This starts off on a bad note (when the copter took off at the end of the previous ish, Frank had been in it.  Now he had inexplicably vanished, and was back in London with Quincy.  Huh?) and gets steadily worse, as Drac keeps a broken-legged Rachel alive, even finding food for her and intending to return her to civilization, while she continually tries to kill him.  Ostensibly Drac keeps her alive in order to feed on her later, since he expects it to be days before they can get out of the blizzard.  However, despite being entirely capable of using his oft-demonstrated hypnotic power on her, or simply biting her and enslaving her (another trick he’s done numerous times before), he simply lets her keep trying to stake him until, finally fed up, he tries to kill her, but is stopped when he is attacked by a ….flesh-eating mountain goat.  Yes, you heard it here first, folks.  Ish 19 is an embarrassment.

gotta watch out for those killer mountain goats...

The series carried on its way, getting even dumber with the introduction of Dr. Sun, a brain-in-a-tank which captures Drac and the vampire hunters.  The less said of Dr. Sun the better, but Marv apparently liked him – he returned in other Wolfman-penned titles.  By this point in reading the series, I’d started to rule ToD to be a rather overrated bummer.

And then, something happened.

Issue 22 kicked off with a new story, “In Death Do We Join,” the story of a violent, abusive man who returns as a vampire to haunt his long-suffering wife.  This ends in a cemetery-set showdown between Drac and this new, arrogant vamp.  And the story is remarkable.  After so many duds, I confess to picking up this issue with a certain sneer, only to have that sneer wiped off by a genuinely powerful, and haunting tale that will stay with me for a long time.   “In Death Do We Join” is one of the finest tales, and easily one of the finest horror tales, Marvel would ever produce.

What follows is a series of very strong issues.  Dracula takes possession of Castle Dunwick, wherein he finds one Shiela Whittier, a fragile young woman who is being terrorized by her father’s ghost.  Drac, for reasons of his own, exorcises the ghost, and he and Shiela begin a strange relationship, Drac surprised by his own ability to care for the delicate mortal woman, Shiela by the contrast between what she knows to be Drac’s nature, and the way that he cares for her.  The vampire hunters, thinking Drac to have died in a train crash several issues back, go their own separate ways.  In issue 25, Wolfman introduces another vampire – Hannibal King, a hard-boiled detective who hunts vampires and, is himself, a vamp.  This too is completely successful issue and widely  (and rightly) considered a classic

Issues 26-28 involve the search for, and acquisition of, a powerful magic artifact called “the chimera,” which can be used for good or evil (guess which one Drac wants it for?).  This is a strong and satisfying storyline, similar to ones Wolfman would pursue less successfully in his later Night Force series.  It ends in a surprising epilogue in which Drac, enraged by Shiela Whittier’s rejection (she turns away from him when his cruelty and evil nature become too apparent for her to ignore during his quest for the chimera), seeks revenge on her.  Shiela manages to deny him even that, though she loses her life.  The jealous, bitter and twisted Dracula that appears in this epilogue has never been more despicable … or more painfully human.  The equally-remarkable following issue is a kind of epilogue to the epilogue, in which Dracula reflects on previous defeats and frustrations: a noblewoman who engaged him to kill her husband in order to help Otto Von Bismarck take power; a blind child whose abusive father Dracula murders as an act of vengeance on the child’s part for murdering her mother.  The girl does not appreciate this act.  An early encounter with Blade is also recounted. 

During this period, Colan and Tom Palmer’s already quite-decent artwork also climbed to a higher rung – full of detail and atmosphere, the comic was as much a joy to look at as to read, and Colan’s realistic, down-to-earth approach was perfect for the mature, psychological stories Wolfman was telling now.

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last.

With issue 37, Drac arrived in America (Boston, to be precise), and the title started to slide downhill.  First, we’re treated to the spectacle of Drac and Blade fighting a U.S. army platoon mind-controlled by Dr. Sun.  This tiresome Captain America-reject plot took five goddam issues to play itself out.  Secondly, Wolfman introduced the painfully unfunny comic relief character Harold H. Harold, an irritating nebbish who spent most of his time whining and generally behaving like a twelfth-rate Woody Allen character.  Wolfman seemed to like him, though.  He stayed around to the end of the series.

the painfully un-amusing Harold H. Harold

From here, the series became hit-and-miss.  A one-off riff on TV’s “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” in issue 43 was rewarding.  A long story involving Drac’s takeover of a satanic cult, and finding actual love with one of its members, a woman named Domini, with whom Drac would in fact, father a child, had much of the series previous glory in it.  But an unexpected appearance by the Silver Surfer was an unfortunate and unwelcome direction for the series.  It seemed no sooner had the series peaked, then it declined precipitously.

Around issue 60, Wolfman began to right the ship a bit.  Domini gives birth to Drac’s son, who is killed by deposed cult leader Anton Lupeski.  Domini, using strange magic, and opposed by Dracula, resurrects their son, Janus, who is apparently reborn as some kind of angel (though he looks like a third-rate superhero), who, while professing his love for Drac, still fights him (potentially) to the death.  The series becomes weirdly metaphysical, with Janus making vague pronouncements about Dracula’s demise being foretold by destiny, while Drac has a confrontation with Satan himself, pissed off over various foolish deeds of Drac’s.  Drac ends up banished to earth as a mortal.  Desperate, he hunts down his daughter, Lilith, to re-vamp him.  Lilith, still pissed over Drac’s murdering her mother several hundred years prior, refuses and chases him all over New York instead. 

In its final few issues, the series got back on the track of its best moments.  Drac flees to Transylvania, where, beaten and battered, he surrenders to the vampire hunters who have tracked him there (not before treating us to yet another confrontation scenario – yawn), begging them for death.  Having humbled himself, Satan makes him a vamp again.  Drac flees, pursued by the vampire hunters and a horde of pissed-off local vamps who resent his centuries-long domination over them.  He takes shelter in an isolated home, inhabited by a group of children, left alone by their mother as she rushes their sister to doctor.  With the vamps battering at the doors, Drac is forced to fend them off with a large crucifix, saving himself and the children, though burning his hands to a crisp (“Cross Of Fire, Cross Of Fear”, ToD # 69, Apr 1979).  It was a classic story, the best Wolfman had produced for the title in years. 

It was also pretty much the end.  In that issue’s letter column, Wolfman announced that both he and Colan would be leaving the title with issue # 72.  In fact, there would no issue 72.

The 70’s horror boom in comics … in fact, in entertainment, was over. By `75, all of Drac’s fellow Marvel monsters had been cancelled.  Their reprint titles, which had superseded their failed anthology titles, had gone by the end of `77.  DC had mostly retracted as well, though their horror anthologies would continue to limp along till 1980.  Tomb had carried on for an unusually long time, but its sales were falling steadily. 

In fact, it would be 4 months before issue 70 appeared, in a bastardized version – the final three issues had been written and drawn.  Jim Shooter forced Wolfman to cram the material into one double-sized final issue.  Though somewhat compressed, the story, which covers Drac's return to vampiric form, his trial-by-combat with the ersatz leader of the vampire tribe, his final showdown with Quincy Harker and, finally, an aftermath in which the characters try to prepare to move on with their lives.  It was a worthwhile end to an erratic but often impressive series.

It was not quite the end of Dracula as a Marvel property.  He continued for another year in a b&w magazine-size spin-off called, again, Tomb of Dracula.  It lasted six issues (there was also the Dracula Lives b&w from `73-`75, and Giant-Size Dracula, a comic-size annual that produced five issues.  I'll talk about those some other time, as well as the b&w Tomb, some other time). The horror boom was off.  Drac faded from the scene other than sporadic guest appearances. In 1983, a Doctor Strange story had all vampires in the Marvel universe wiped out - which I guess tells you how far the vampire star had fallen for the House Of Ideas.

In 1991, spurred in part I suppose by the Francis Ford Coppola film, Marvel reprinted several key Drac stories, and ran a four-part miniseries entitled Tomb Of Dracula, with Wolfman and Colan at the helm again. It was an unsettling piece, with Drac being resurrected yet again, this time by an overzealous, and foolish, occult researcher hoping to achieve vampiric immortality.  The mini-series was reminiscent of Wolfman/Colan's 80's Night Force series, what with its campus cultists and attempts to raise massive amounts of psychic energy to achieve some nefarious goal.  It was darker - we learn that Rachel died an embittered alcoholic and Blade has become a near-homicidal maniac.  Only Frank seems to have found happiness, with a new wife - until she's kidnapped, possessed by the spirit of the dead Rachel, and drawn into Drac's plans for revenge and domination.  Freed from the restraints of the comics code and the mores of an earlier decade, Wolfman/Colan indulged themselves in all the sexuality, violence and gore they could only hint at in the original run - to the point where it became ludicrous (Drac tearing apart a strip club, gouging out eyes and tearing off faces).  Colan's was not the draftsman he once was, and here he let himself go with wild, twisted panels and montages - he was no doubt aiming for surreal, but the effect was often more sloppy and grotesque.  But it was a good story, with a spectacular ending.  It wasn't a bad epilogue.

What's left to say?  ToD was a good horror comic - probably Marvel's best horror comic, overall.  But it had as many failures as it did successes.  The first three issues (mostly to set the scene), issues 22-36, and 60-70 - and a few scattered winners - slightly less than half its run.  It was a good series, but, given its rep, I wish it had been more.