Okay, well the first steps into our little darkened corner of the Marvel Universe were light-hearted and cartoonlike, but I can assure you this journal within a journal will not be concentrating only on the light and fluffy side of things, and to prove that, next up we have
That's right: the big guy himself, baddest of the bad, known from just about every media and reference you can think of, the original vampire, the one, the only
The Count may seem an odd subject to feature in a comic, even a Marvel comic, but fact is, that up until about 1971 comics were forbidden to feature vampires of any sort. Then the law was relaxed slightly; if the vampire being portrayed was from literature, that was okay, and of course that opened the door for Marvel to start working on their own adaptation of the most famous vampire of all. And to give them credit, they seem to have made a good job of it. They resisted the urge to just transplant him into the twentieth century (which was then the present) and instead revisited his own life story. Of course, they had to use a whole hell of a lot of artistic licence, but they still managed to create a believable backstory for the Count.
And here it is.
After finally tracking down a copy of
Suspense issue seven from 1951, when all this began, I was more than a little disappointed. Given what I had read on Wiki about the biographical history of Marvel's Dracula, I had hoped I would see drawings of him in the fifteenth century, but as it turns out his genesis is explained by way of a tale related by a man who calls to the house of a horror writer, one Xavier Sandor, to try to convince the writer that Dracula yet lives. The man, who calls himself Tartoff, explains that he has been tracking Dracula across the world, and the trail has led to here. Sandor is of course skeptical: as he says himself, he writes about vampires and other demons for a living, but he doesn't
believe in them. To hear someone say they exist is preposterous to him, but if nothing else he acknowledges that his visitor has come a long way to speak to him, and he should afford him the courtesy of giving him a fair hearing. Besides, what he hears, while it almost certainly will not be true, may give him inspiration for the story he is currently writing, as he is at the moment suffering from writer's block.
And so he listens as the mysterious Tartoff tells the tale of the evil count who was doomed to wander the Earth for eternity because of the horrors he perpetrated on his fellow humans. Now, oddly and very annoyingly, this story does not contain the birth (“to darkness”, as Anne Rice would put it) of the vampire, and so I have to take the information Wiki has and drop it in here without unfortunately any other source. I'm not sure where this information came from – perhaps the story comes up in a later issue – but I feel it's important to explore the creature's origins, as according to Marvel.
Born Vlad Dracula in 1430 in Transylvania, he took over the throne of that country when quite young, and was wounded in battle in 1459, necessitating the services of a witch called Lianda, who was a vampire unbeknownst to him, and turned him in revenge for his persecution of her people, the Romanian gypsies. After defeating Nimrod, the most powerful vampire on Earth, Dracula took his place, becoming the ruler of all vampires. As related in the novel by Bram Stoker, he was defeated by Abraham Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker, and sealed in his coffin but later the Frankenstein monster accidentally freed him. Thereafter he wandered Rome, Hungary and England in his insatiable quest for blood.
“Dracula”
Yes, it's hardly the most inspired of titles for the first story in the series, I know, but that's how it is. And yes, despite what I believed above initially, they did in fact just transplant the Count into the twentieth century; though being Marvel, this would never be the trite "Dracula wakes up in 1970" or whatever line that some writers might pursue, the line of least resistance. Marvel were always about more than that.
Revealed in his own long-running series (seventy issues) via
The Tomb of Dracula, this is where we first meet the Count after his last imprisonment in his coffin. I'm not quite sure what era we're in here, but given the cars and the fact that someone would only bring ten dollars with them on a foreign expedition (America to Transylvania) I would have to assume we're talking 1950s/1960s? Anyway, Frank Drake, last living descendant of Vlad Dracula (the family changed their name when they left “the Old Country”) is desperate for money, having already blown a huge inheritance, and when his friend, Clifton Graves, learns that Frank is actually from the Dracula bloodline, and that he has the very Castle Dracula itself on his hands, he sees a golden opportunity, both for Frank to remake his fortune and perhaps for he, Clifton, to coin it in too. A perfect tourist opportunity, not to be missed.
And so the two of them head to Romania, with Frank's girlfriend Jeanie in tow. There is tension in the car as they drive, as Jeanie used to be Clifton's girl but they split up; he however does not accept that it's over and keeps trying to win her back. As they reach the castle Frank has a dread feeling of
deja vu, as if he's been here before, and a very familiar feeling steals over him, as if, as if he is coming home. Confused by these new thoughts, he retreats into himself, trying to work it out, while Clifton goes off to explore, and falls through the rotten floorboards, finding himself in a passage that leads to the very burial chamber of Dracula, where he comes across the fabled coffin itself. Opening it, he finds a skeleton inside, with a large piece of wood stuck in its breast. This can only be the wooden stake which Stoker's writings claimed was driven through the vampire's heart. Not believing such tales – thinking that the corpse belonged to a madman who had somehow convinced the terrified villagers around here that he was a vampire – he takes the stake out.
Anyone who isn't following along and doesn't know what's going to happen please leave now; you're too stupid to be reading this.
Graves heads off, murder and the retaking of his lover in his mind, visions of riches dancing in his brain, so much so that he fails to see that behind him the skeleton, freed from the stake that pinned it down, is acquiring flesh again, as mists swirl around it, and moments later it rises from the coffin, a man again, a vampire, and Dracula is reborn! Laughing at Graves's attempts to shoot him, he bats (sorry!) the gun aside and throws the man down into the pit, there to await his dread fate. Then Dracula hears the sounds of voices in his castle, which he had assumed deserted, and goes to investigate. Attempting to draw Jeanie to him by his hypnotic gaze, he is outsmarted by Drake, who knocks his girlfriend out and then uses the silver compact he had given her to drive Dracula off, silver being poison to vampires.
When the villagers come across a dead barmaid, they know that Dracula has been awakened, and not surprisingly blame it on Drake and his party. As you would expect, they form a mob to confront the creature in its castle in time-honoured style. Meanwhile Dracula, his hunger for now sated but unsatisfied (“the girl was bitter, full of petty evil”) returns to his castle and spies Jeanie sleeping. He is again frustrated though as he bends over her, recoiling from the golden crucifix around her neck. When Drake reveals who he is, his opponent snarls but takes a step back when the human produces the compact again, this time opening it and showing him the mirror inside. He throws it at the Count, who reels back but grabs Drake, punching him and knocking him to the ground. As Jeanie wakes, Dracula, now undisturbed, orders her to remove the protective crucifix, which she does. The villagers, seeing the dropped religious symbol as they enter the courtyard, set the castle on fire while Frank, dazed but not dead, again rises and attacks Dracula with the compact. He, seeing the castle now in flames, flies off, cursing.
Outside, the villagers, seeing the castle burn, turn away as Frank looks in anguish at the body of his girlfriend. His anguish is soon worse though, as she stands up, not dead, but turned into a vampire, and walks off laughing, as a bat joins her, hovering above her.
