Improving TOMB OF DRACULA

I've made it clear how much I dislike "Bad Girl" versions of Vampirella compared to the classic Gonzalez version (here and here, with one caveat here). Such comparisons naturally invite the question of whether I'm just a grumpy old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn.

On a biographical note, although I was vaguely aware of Vampirella as a horror icon before the nineties, it was the Harris relaunch and reprints that kindled my interest and introduced me to the character. So nostalgia really has nothing to do with it. I discovered the old stuff and the new stuff all at once, and the superiority of the former to the latter was as plain as a slap in the face--it was like watching Highlander for the first time as part of a double-feature with Highlander 2.

But in order to completely dispel any lingering suspicions that I'm against updates in general, I offer here my analysis of one that I think really worked: Tomb of Dracula. This was such a solid and impressive series originally, it's hard to imagine any update could actually improve on it--and yet that's exactly what Epic's four-issue miniseries did. What's more, the Tomb update appeared at roughly the same time as the new Vampirella in the early nineties, and like the new Vampirella, the Tomb update was going for a tone that was darker, edgier, sexier, and more violent than the original. The difference is that it got all that stuff right, where Vampirella didn't.

The first thing to note about the update is that it reunited Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, the creative team for almost the entirety of the original series' 70-issue run (Colan was the artist all the way through, and Wolfman joined him starting with issue 7). It's too easy, especially in hindsight, to take for granted that this reunion would guarantee something so great. In theory at least, they might have phoned in something disappointing, or delivered something satisfying in a purely workmanlike fashion; to their credit, they brought their A+ game, and raised Tomb of Dracula to the next level and then some.

Taking an already gothic comic in a darker direction can be an iffy proposition; the whole effect is ruined if it comes off as affected or overwrought. Wolfman and Colan managed it by taking advantage of the layers and depth they'd already built into the series. Superficially, Tomb of Dracula was a four-color horror comic with spooktacular guest creatures, pulpy villains like Dr. Sun (a megalomaniacal brain-in-a-vat!), and even the occasional superhero like Silver Surfer.

But underneath that was always a powerful undercurrent of real horror, tragedy, and loss. Everyone who hunts Dracula is damaged, and comes from a family he's damaged over generations. Their scars are physical, like Quincy's useless legs, and emotional, like Rachel's aloofness and Blade's consuming rage. No matter how many times they plunge into horror and mortal danger, Dracula is the recurring nightmare from which they never wake. It's a long war, and it wears them down.

The page at left exquisitely captures this crushing sense of doom. Harker has just faced Dracula alone in one of the most titanic struggles in horror comicdom. I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say he took his best shot at putting the Lord of Vampires down once and for all, and found it bitterly stymied by Dracula's cunning. By the way, those shards on the floor are the shattered urn that held his daughter's ashes--the daughter he had to stake himself after Dracula turned her into a vampire. At the end of their encounter, Dracula gleefully scattered the ashes all over Harker and smashed the urn at his feet. Here we have probably as strong and concentrated a dose of this mood as you're going to find, but even at its subtlest, it permeates the whole series. Dracula really hurts those who have anything to do with him.

Taking the later miniseries in a darker direction, then, essentially amounted to skimming away all of the lighter and pulpier elements, and laying bare the foundation of darkness, horror, and loss Wolfman and Colan had so painstakingly established.

As the story opens, the passage of time is measured by how much Frank Drake has healed since the events of Tomb's final issue (Wolfman wisely picks up the continuity from there, disregarding appearances by Dracula and other characters in other Marvel titles). He is presented as someone who's climbed out of a deep, dark pit. In fact, he emerged from therapy, fell in love with someone new, and married, and seems genuinely happy and at peace.

But then Marlene, his wife, begins to have nightmares about his former life, in which she plays the part of Rachel Van Helsing (who died some years before of mysterious causes--entirely unrelated to the events depicted in X-Men Annual #6). Frank feels the shadow of Dracula falling across his life once again. The original series' sense of dread and desolation is reestablished in the concentrated form of a resurfacing torrent of unwelcome memories. Old wounds reopen--literally! In Tomb #12, Dracula's bats left scars on Rachel's face that remained for the whole rest of the series:

To Frank's horror, a delusional Marlene disfigures herself to replicate those scars:

Even before Dracula's physical revival, it's awful seeing Frank's hard-won new life and happiness disintegrate and descend into the nightmare he thought he'd escaped. When at last the Count stands before him and mercilessly gouges his deepest fears and insecurities with this soul-destroying address:

. . . it's hard to blame Frank for responding as he does:

By the time Frank says he "can't go through it all over again," the events of the preceding series have been made to seem in retrospect nothing like a fun, four-color, Code-approved comic book, but rather like a traumatizing, never-ending hell on earth--which they actually were, after all, only the effect was lightened by the pulpier elements, which receive no mention here.

I think that outlines pretty clearly Wolfman's general approach to darkening the tone of Tomb for the update. But also, specifically, he heightens the sex and violence quotients in this Epic line, non-Code miniseries.

In the original series, of course, Dracula's taste always ran to the ladies, but despite his numerous victims and the women he interacted with more extensively, the sexual aspect was largely implicit. So how did Wolfman and Colan sex things up? Not by introducing ridiculously busty and skimpily clad Bad Girls, nor by depicting Dracula as some glamorous rock-star stud, but by depicting his sexuality as one more facet of his capacity for destroying lives. Sex with Dracula is nightmarish and necrophiliac. It binds his chosen slave to him, and traumatizes her into a regressive state:



As for violence, well, we've never seen anything like this in Tomb of Dracula before:

Colan is known for his subtlety and awesome command of atmosphere, but this just goes to show he can take the gloves off and slug you in the gut with the best of them. And Dracula comes across as just so savage that, shocking as this is, it's completely in-character and doesn't seem at all forced or gratuitous.

Speaking of Colan, his contribution to darkening the tone of the update and making it edgier goes beyond even Wolfman's, which I've mostly focused on so far. His art in this miniseries is a tour de force, something truly special even by the high standards of all his prior work. He doesn't just make the monsters scary and set the typically dread-laden mood he's famous for; he launches into an audaciously less realistic style and a more fluid approach to page layout that imbues the whole thing with the funhouse-mirror distortion associated with nightmares and the supernatural. I've honestly never seen a horror comic in which the artistic style so perfectly, chillingly reflects the subject matter.

And that's most true of all in his depiction of the Count. Colan has always done a masterful job of conveying the shivery wonder of Dracula's powers of transformation:

This time, though, he pushes it to another whole level, and makes Dracula's demonically metamorphic nature central to his visual iconography. Here's a sample two-page spread, which is quite representative (though by no means exhaustive) of Dracula's ever-shifting form within this story:

Dark magic seems to drip from every page, but never more so than when Dracula is on it.

Finally, in keeping with the themes of damage and loss, not everyone is okay when all the dust has settled. Blade's grasp on sanity, already tenuous from the moment Frank recruits him, finally slips completely through his fingers:

Now, for all the reasons above, this is an extraordinary update of a series that was already great. In fairness to Vampirella, however, this was conceived and executed as a miniseries, and it could not have served as a Tomb of Dracula relaunch. It didn't mean to kick the series off again and take it in new directions, the way Vampirella ultimately went; it only meant to tell this single story and be done.

Indeed, when next we see these characters, they've been taken in very different directions, apparently considered better-suited for ongoing series in the market at that time. Blade comes back into action, and--most disappointing of all--Frank Drake is given the male equivalent of the blow-up doll treatment:

Ugh. Oh well.