Shocktober 10/9/21

Did you know that legendary bloodsucker Count Dracula was based on a real person?

It's true. Vlad Dracul of Wallachia (a province roughly where Romania is now) was, by all accounts, a bloodthirsty ruler who murdered opponents and allies alike in horrible ways--for example, beheading them and displaying said heads on posts for all to see and, um, "enjoy."

The story of Dracula, the vampire, has been told many times in many different media--novels, movies, TV, comic books, stage plays, etc.

But the story of Vlad the Impaler has not been told nearly as often. There was a movie called In Search of Dracula made back in the '70s starring Christopher Lee (a man with no small experience playing Dracula), and I recall a book being published around the same time that explored his old castle and lands. There was even a prologue added to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula emphasizing that Dracula had started out as a man--a warlord, really, who loved and lost--who became Lord of the Vampires.

Veteran comic book writer Roy Thomas and artist Estaban Maroto, who drew more than a few issues of Vampirella, teamed up to tell the tale of Vlad the Impaler for Topps, the baseball card company that oh-so-briefly had a comic book line a few decades ago.

And now, thanks to the good folks at IDW Comics, Thomas' and Maroto's version of the Dracula origin tale is available again.

Shocktober 10/2/21

Mego's Hammer Dracula would like to know what you think you're doing.

Shocktober 10/7/20

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.

Shocktober 10/15/19

"Listen to them...children of the night...what music they make!"