Back in the mid-1970s, Marvel Comics has a very successful comic book called Tomb of Dracula. (I do believe I've mentioned it once or twice before.)
At the height of this success, they launched a second Dracula title, this one a black & white magazine called Dracula Lives. It only ran 13 issues over a couple of years, and most of its stories were stand-alone tales from Dracula's past (with a few set in the present) drawn by a number of different hands, including Neal Adams and regular Tomb artist Gene Colan.
One of the stories that ran in Dracula Lives was the very first Dracula story: An adaptation of the original Bram Stoker novel, with Roy Thomas writing the script and Dick Giordano providing the gray-tone artwork. It was a faithful adaptation, including characters and scenes often left out of film and TV versions.
Unfortunately, Marvel didn't stick with its black-and-white comics for very long, canceling Dracula Lives after only 13 issues. (The main comic ran 70 issues.) And when Dracula Lives was canceled, the adaptation of Stoker's novel was only about one third done.
But you can't keep a good vampire down--or even an exceptionally bad one--and Marvel's adaptation of Stoker's novel was revived in 2004: first as a four-issue miniseries (with Thomas and Giordano returning to finish what they'd started), then as a hardcover collection of that miniseries.
I recently reacquired that hardcover. Color me blood red...er, I mean happy.
2 comments:
I expect the hardcover collection is difficult to find, but you are great at scouting such treasures.
Actually not--it was only ever issued in hardcover, and I found it pretty easily on both eBay and Amazon Marketplace.
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