Inspector Chelm, who made his first appearance in Tomb of Dracula # 3, has since turned his initial disbelief in vampires into well-founded knowledge thanks to Quincy Harker and is now a formidable vampire hunter in his own right - demonstrated in this issue by the fact that he has armed the fire weapons of his policemen with silver bullets inn order to pose an effective threat to Dracula.

However, a slowly dying Dracula has prepared for all eventualities and tells Harker to call Rachel van Helsing. Sensing another diabolic move by his adversary, Harker phones up Rachel and learns that two female vampires have taken her prisoner and that they will kill her unless Dracula is released...

Elsewhere, Frank Drake learns that the men he is supposedly supervising are, in actual fact, zombies and he finds himself running for his life.

Marvel, however, took an entirely different route with regard to commonly known existing literary originals by acknowleding them outright and expressis verbis but portraying them all to be grand misconceptions: books such as Dracula or Frankenstein are not, as everybody thinks, works of fiction, but rather accounts of actual events, i.e. factual eye witness reports. This quite intriguing twist was, in fact, the standard logic of the Marvel Universe and rooted in Stan Lee's very early conception that Marvel comic books about superheroes were to be perceived as being published in a New York City which was populated by these very same superheroes. It was therefore only logical for Dr Doom to pass by the Marvel offices at 665 Madison Avenue and use the Fantastic Four's connection to comic book creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to trick Reed Richards into paying them a visit to help on their latest adaptation of the FF's epics in Fantastic Four #10 (January 1963). There was a similar strand of wry humour in the early issues of Tomb of Dracula when Dracula, brought back to life, discovers that he actually is the subject of a published novel; after all, he missed the publication because Bram Stoker's book ends with the death of Dracula.

Marv Wolfman, however, had never been too happy with this presumed period of inactivity for Dracula between c. 1890 and 1972 ever since he took on the title with Tomb of Dracula #7, and this issue illustrates better than any previous one just why this was so.

"I realised pretty quickly that in order to do anything I had to decide on the handling of the characters and what the series was about (...) I was less concerned about the individual plots at this point than I was about the direction of the characters."
(Marv Wolfman in an October 2005 interview with Comic Geek Speak Podcast)

"I wanted to center on characters. And once you did that, that was the subtle difference [to previous writers], because everything was about people."
(Marv Wolfman in a September 2005 interview with Comic Zone Radio)

If Wolfman had followed the initial plot laid out in the first six issues of Tomb of Dracula, then Quincy Harker would, simply enough, not have been born until after Dracula's death at the end of the novel and would therefore not have encountered the count before his resurrection at the hands of Frank Drake in Tomb of Dracula #1, set in 1972 real time. However, given Wolfman's emphasis on the characters of the comic book title and their reasons for being what they were, it is obvious enough that the intense relationship between Dracula and Quincy Harker - which amongst other things provided the main impetus and motivation for Harker to form his band of vampire hunters - could hardly stem from a rivalry and antagonistic struggle which was merely two or three years old.

Rather, it had to be something of an almost lifelong crusade, fuelled every now and then by dramatic events and encounters. The same, in slightly toned down form, applied to the characters of Rachel van Helsing and Taj.

"I kind of improved as the series went on. The more you work on something, the better you get at it. I felt that the character became my own."
(Gene Colan in an October 2007 interview by classic-horror.com)

The pencils of Gene Colan and the inks of Tom Palmer were now so atmospheric that they virtually sucked readers into the comic book - not the least because the art had by now taken on a near cinematic feel.

"I was mostly influenced by film. Understand film, frame by frame, is very much like panel to panel. The lighting in black and white films taught me a great deal."
(Gene Colan in a 2007 interview by www.slayerlit.us)

The final page from Tomb of Dracula #33 illustrates this nicely: the dramatic and turbulent events depicted on this page are set into panels which themselves are tilted and jagged and almost force themselves into their adjacent counterparts. The page as a whole thus reflects the disturbing and eruptive contents it displays in its individual panels - just like a film would, both by nature of its individual frames as well as through the scene which those frames make up.

The final page of Tomb of Dracula #33, pencilled by Gene Colan and inked by Tom Palmer (scanned from the original art page in my personal collection - the dedication and signature by Gene Colan on the Dracula file are, of course, later additions).

(For more background information on the series, its creators, and its literary and cinematographic inspirations,
you might wish to delve further into the Tomb of Dracula)

And finally, in Brazil, Frank Drake finds himself in dire straits face to face with the zombies but at the very last moment a bizare character named Brother Voodoo appears to rescue him.

The creative team behind Tomb of Dracula was able to uphold the uniqueness of Dracula for a surprisingly long time, adding to the possibility that this ongoing tale just might take place in a world which had only one supernatural element: plenty of vampires but not a single costumed superhero. The way the title was steadily weaving the rims of its own world and purporting independence from the rest of Marvel's range of characters escaped the attention of the editors in charge for a long time, but not for ever, and one day Marv Wolfman finally received clear orders from the inner sanctum of the House of Ideas: to make sure people knew that this was all happening in the "Marvel Universe". The first such interaction had taken place in Tomb of Dracula #18 with Werewolf by Night, and now, almost 18 months later, Wolfman had to once more establish contact with the rest of Marvel's array of characters. Consciously avoiding any super-heroes, he turned to Marvel's world of horror and found Brother Voodoo - introduced in Strange Tales #169 in September 1973 with plotting by Len Wein and pencilling, conveniently, by Gene Colan.

"I brought in Brother Voodoo because - as strange as the name is - the character could fit (...) I just absolutely turned down though every possible use of writing the character with any other standard Marvel heroes (...) that was a very conscious move on my part."
(Marv Wolfman in an October 2005 interview with Comic Geek Speak Podcast)

More a forced than a voluntary plot move by Wolfman, the result was as uninspring as could be expected and displayed all the lacklustre traits of Universal's 1940s productions of "Dracula meets the Wolf-man plus Frankenstein plus you-name-it". Brother Voodoo in Tomb of Dracula #35 is just that: a guest appearance for the sake of a guest appearance.

With hindsight, however, the move did not prove a winning point for Tomb of Dracula, and although the series would continue for almost another three years and 34 issues, some of the things that went wrong were quintessentially rooted in the transfer to the US and thus Tomb of Dracula #36.

 

The illustrations presented here are copyright material and are reproduced for strictly non-commercial and appreciative review purposes only.
Text is (c) 2006-2014 A. T. Wymann

page originally posted on the web 19 June 2006
page completely revised 1 October 2009
reposted 22 March 2014