Cover Cavalcade

 APRIL IS MARVEL MONSTERS MONTH!!

A Gil Kane cover from 1975.

Fighting Vampires and... Children? Part 2

 

Depending on the source, this cover is credited to Gene Colan, Rich Buckler or John Buscema

Tomb of Dracula #8 (May 1973) starts with last issue's cliffhanger and breaks off into two seperate stories. Both stories are strong, with Gene Colan's excellent art giving life to tales that heavily center around death. Marv Wolfman is the writer.

The two storylines are intertwined throughout the issue, but we'll discuss them one at a time. The vampire hunters were trapped in the basement of Dracula's hideout, being attacked by knife-wielding children. The kids are under Dracula's mind control, so they are relentless in their efforts to slaughter the adults. 

It's a brilliant plot devise. The killers are children who aren't responsible for what they are doing. The idea of hurting or even killing them to stop them is in of itself as horrifying as being killed by them.

Quincy has radioed his daughter Edith for help. She shows up in the nick of time in a helicopter equipped with a sonic device that knocks out the kids. They'll wake up later with no memory of what happened to them. Quincy, it turns out, has a high-level contact in the House of Lords, giving him access to cool equipment when he needs it.

Dracula, in the meantime, has to deal with the poison dart that hit him at the end of the last issue. The nature of the poison isn't spelled out, but I suppose it could be garlic-based or maybe involves holy water. In any case, Drac is in pain. 

He visits a doctor who is himself a vampire, though the doc hides this condition from his family and patients.

The doctor gives Dracula a complete blood transfusion, curing him of the poison. But Dracula's not done with him yet. The doctor has also invented a projector that can raise the dead into an army of undead. Dracula plans to use this to create a world-conquering army.

This leads to a battle between the two as the doctor, horrified by Drac's intentions, finally breaks away from his control. The bat vs. bat aerial battle that follows is pretty cool, though it ends tragically with the doctor's death.

Wolfman's dialogue here is great, highlighting both Dracula's lust for power and the pathos of the doctor's situation. Colan's art is, of course, fantastic. Like the puppet-children story, this part of the issue involves someone forced to do evil. In this case, that person rejects the evil, even though it costs him his life.

So both storylines in this issue are wonderful, interlinked thematically but each telling a short but strong horror tale.

Next week, we'll jump to the DC Universe and visit with the Elongated Man.

Fighting Vampires and... Children?

 

cover art by Larry Lieber

Tomb of Dracula had an uneven start for its first few issues, but once Marv Wolfman settled in as the regular writer, the book really took off. Gene Colan's art was  perfect for the title and the individual stories were strong, but it was Wolfman who brought cohesion to Dracula's modern comic book mythos.

When he came aboard for Tomb of Dracula #7 (March 1973), the main protagonist was Frank Drake, a descendant of Dracula. He'd been joined by Rachel Van Helsing (the good professor's granddaughter) and the mute Indian strongman Taj Nital. With Wolfman's first issue, he added Quincy Harker, the son of Jonathan and Mina. It's a brilliant idea.

In 1973, Quincy would have been in his 70s, so it was plausible that he could still be around. We meet him right after Dracula, who is currently hiding out in London, attacks Quincy's daughter Edith. Edith was wearing a cross, so the vampire couldn't put the bite on her. He leaves her to be eaten by rats, but Quincy arrives in time to drive off the vermin. He's in a wheelchair, but he's still active and quick-thinking.

He contacts Frank, Rachel and Taj. All of them get together at Quincy's mansion, where he explains he's been fighting vampires his entire life. He's gone high-tech in his anti-vampire weaponry, demonstrating a device that fires a garlic-lined net.

But Dracula is already plotting against them. He hypnotises a group of children, turning them into his mindless slaves. Then, using rats and himself in bat-form, he pursues some poor sap through the streets of London. He drives the guy to Quincy's mansion before attacking him.

The good guys attack. After a brief tussle, Dracula flees, luring the vampire hunters to his current hideout.

They enter to stake him in his coffin, but the guy in that coffin is a random corpse dressed as Dracula. The vampire springs his trap, sending in his small army of children to attack the humans. The good guys either have to fight (and possibly kill) innocent children OR allow the children to kill them.

Dracula laughs and leaves them to their fate, though Quincy manages to wound him by firing a volley of wooden darts out of his wheelchair. But Dracula still escapes and the heroes seem doomed.

Are they doomed? We'll look at the next issue next week. 

This issue is great. I love the idea of Quincy Harker (the only character from the original novel who can believably still be alive) becoming a key protagonist in the series. Frank Drake is a good character in his own right, but by himself I don't think he would have been a strong enough hero to balance out Dracula. The Quincy/Rachel/Frank/Taj team (occasionally joined by Blade or other guest stars) gave the book more variety and more... well, more pure coolness. 

Cover Cavalcade

Wonderful Gene Colan cover from 1976.

The Private Eye and the Vampire

One of the strengths of Marvel's 1970s Tomb of Dracula was the cast of characters that made up the vampire hunters. In the first issue, there was Frank Drake, a descendant of Dracula. But as the ranks of the good guys grew, he was overshadowed by others who were frankly much cooler than he ever managed to be.

There was Quincy Harker, the elderly and wheelchair-bound son of Jonathan and Mina Harker. He was leader of the group, rich enough to pay expenses and get his wheelchair tricked-out so that it could do things like fire wooden, garlic-tipped darts.

There was Taj Nital, the big Indian who lost his son to a vampire attack.

There was Rachel Van Helsing, Abraham Van Helsing's granddaughter--an action girl armed with a crossbow.

There was Blade, of course, who normally worked alone as he stalked vampires with his bandoleer of wooden throwing knives. Because of the movie trilogy, Blade is probably the best known of the characters, though eventually he stopped using the throwing knives and went to different and significantly less cool weaponry. (We'll be looking at an early Blade story soon just to show how awesome he used to be.)

And then there's Hannibal King, who debuted in Tomb of Dracula #25 (October 1974). He's a private detective, born in the States but working in London, who is hired by a young widow to find out why Dracula killed her husband.

It's a great story in a great series. Gene Colan's art work through the run of the series was always perfect, expertly showing us the horrific elements of the stories without every being gross or overly graphic. Marv Wolfman, who began writing the series starting with the seventh issue and really helped it find its proper voice, smoothly mixed single-issue tales with extended story arcs.

King's debut is constructed as a typical hard-boiled P.I. tale, with King himself giving us the expected first-person narration. If the story has a weakness, it's that the short length means the case he investigates if pretty straightforward and isn't that difficult to solve. He stops by a tavern the dead man used to frequent and nearly gets killed. He checks out the accounting office where the man worked and pretty much stumbles over an important clue. This eventually brings him to a warehouse where Dracula and a few vampire minions are hiding out. It a very arguable point, but a more complex case in the vein of Chandler and Hammett, stretched over two or three issues, might have been better.

But there's something going on within that story to give it an extra layer of awesome.

If you don't know the character of Hannibal King, I'm afraid there's no way to talk about it without giving away the twist at the end of his first appearance. King is himself a vampire. But unlike all other vampires as portrayed in the Marvel Universe, he retained his humanity. Draining blood from corpses or stealing from blood banks, he survived without ever attacking anyone.

It also turns out he was vampirized (I may have just coined that word, by the way) by Deacon Frost, the same vampire who killed Blade's mother. It takes him awhile to get around to it, but you can see Marv Wolfman was already thinking about getting Blade (who hates all vampires with a passion) to team up with the one morally good vampire in existence.

Wolfman and Colan do an excellent job of hiding clues of King's real nature throughout the story--such as King having no reflection in a mirror that in the background of one panel.

I dislike the modern Twilight-inspired trend of turning vampires into romantic figures who make teenage girls go all atwitter. Vampires, when handled correctly, are great villains. You can make individual vampire characters sympathetic, but they still gotta be the bad guys to be effective.

So I am particularly impressed that Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan managed to give us a good guy vampire that I approve of. They do so by using him in a horror series that was already giving us strong stories, giving him a good back-story, and making him an exception to the rule that becoming a vampire turns you into a soulless monster.

No one has ever managed to come up with a group of monster hunters as interesting and varied as did the creative people behind Tomb of Dracula. Hannibal King was a worthy addition to this group.