How Marvel Comics killed Dracula over and over again

11.11.2023 - 14:47 / polygon.com / Stan Lee

Comic books — that great gutter medium — have always been worlds of fads and crazes. Cowboys, cops, romances, and, starting in the late 1940s, horror. Publishers like EC, Avon, and Atlas churned out lurid tales of murder, betrayal, and inky gore for the next few years.

And then, sweeping across the moors in 1954, howling dogs of American morality led by censorious psychiatrist Fredric Wertham drove the industry into a panic. Desperate to survive, publishers adopted the Comics Code, a strict system of rules describing what could and could not appear on the newsstand.

Seemingly overnight, ghouls, creeps, slashers, and vampires were eradicated from the pages of the funnies, replaced by anodyne teen hijinks and long-underwear heroes.

But one creature of the night ended up rising again… and again… and again….

The Comics Code was revised several times in the early 1970s — once at the behest of writer Marv Wolfman, who could not be credited for his stories because “wolfman” was a forbidden concept — but most germane to our tale was a 1971 adjustment that noted “vampires, ghouls and werewolves shall be permitted to be used when handled in the classic tradition.”

That “classic tradition” was just vague enough to inspire Stan Lee to launch a new line of horror-influenced characters including Ghost Rider, Werewolf by Night, and Man-Thing. Among those efforts was the publication of Tomb of Dracula #1 in April of 1972. After a fairly generic first few issues, the book introduced its durable supporting cast of vampire hunters like Quincy Harker, Hannibal King, Frank Drake, and the daywalker Blade.

Dracula’s first interaction with the regular Marvel universe came in 1974’s Giant-Size Spider-Man, where the wall-crawler winds up at a costume party on a cruise ship with the vampire lord and a passel of gangster goons looking to steal an experimental vaccine, the kind of thing you would absolutely bring to a masquerade on the high seas.

Meanwhile, Count Dracula was also getting weird in his own book. In issue 21, we meet Doctor Sun, an evil Chinese scientist who had his brain removed and placed in a jar, giving him a thirst for blood himself. Sun hatched a goofy scheme to steal Dracula’s powers and, in issue 39, had his henchman Juno kill the vampire for the first time with a silver lance through the heart.

What’s Tomb of Dracula without Dracula? Just a tomb? Our protagonists battled Doctor Sun for a couple issues before they realized that they needed the help of their former foe, and in #41, supporting character Aurora Rabinowitz cried virginal tears into Dracula’s ashy coffin, returning the lich lord to unlife and letting him lay a well-deserved ass-whooping on Sun. Dracula then fought Doctor Strange a few issues