The Vampire Acts Out
The issue following baby Janus’s death (60) is almost entirely devoted to Dracula’s grief. But he is the title character of a four-color comic; no one would expect readers to shell out their hard-earned 30 cents for 18 pages of a vampire crying softly in the corner. Fortunately, both Marvel Comics and Dracula himself have a set of habits that will save the day. As we have already seen, the Spider-Man comics of the 1960s were master classes in the transformation of internal psychic conflict into more visually-appealing physical violence. Dracula, who almost (but not quite) met Peter Parker in an issue of Giant-Size Marvel Team-Up, is one of the few Marvel characters who can out monologue Spider-Man.
BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT? UH..SURE…
We have already seen several instances where Dracula’s introspection leads him to retell stories from his past aloud, as well as numerous occasions when he discusses his plans and feelings aloud to no audience in particular. Long before thought balloons fell out of fashion, Wolfman banished them from Tomb of Dracula in favor of narrative captions, epistolary frameworks, and, of course, the spoken monologue. In Issue 60, Dracula is rarely silent, but his words are accompanied by physical violence when he destroys parts of the dark church. As a vampire, though, he has an outlet that simple mortals do not. He can call down the storm as a physical manifestation of his feelings. When he does so, it is a reminder of Dracula’s narrative function, indeed, his superpower: he serves to transform inner feelings into outward word and actions, extending even to his environment. Dracula is a walking, blood-sucking pathetic fallacy.
The following issue sees Domini resurrect Janus, over Dracula’s protests. But it begins with an unlikely splash-page: Dracula, assuming a contemplate pose while sitting under tree, wondering aloud: “Should I return to Domini? Haven’t I caused her enough grief?/ What should I do—? What should I do?” Just a few years before, this would have been unimaginable, but now it is entirely consistent with the ongoing story of Dracula’s undead life.
When Dracula realizes that Domini intends to resurrect Janus, he arrives too lat to stop her. Janus is reborn in adult form, as the golden-skinned “demon” who tormented the vampire over the centuries. Of course, Janus is no demon—he is actually an angel, on a mission from God to stop Dracula. As with Domini’s pregnancy, the fight between Dracula and Janus turns out not to lend itself well to ongoing comics drama. There is really no reason Janus couldn’t simply turn Dracula into ash at any given moment. So when the conflict is first represented in issue 62, it is largely through the eyes of Domini, tormented that her husband and son must be locked in battle. In a truly odd storytelling choice, Domini ruminates over her own relationship with her father and the struggle between Janus and Dracula, but not while simply sitting alone in thought (like Sheila years earlier), or while watching an actual battle, but instead depicting their fight as a symbolic struggle. In a full-page spread with no panel borders, Domini looks on as Janus and Dracula sit opposite each other in fancy chairs, their hands in front of them in a pose that looks like something between a (sitting) boxing stance and two men airing out their nails after a manicure. Throughout their entire fight, they never leave their seats.
As an insight into Domini’s state of mind, this is an intriguing page, but as drama, it’s a non-starter. Instead, Wolfman hijacks the Dracula/Janus conflict in service of another plot (which will last two more issues), after which father and son meet face-to-face only one more time. This makes sense: Dracula has been so worried that his son will grow up to oppose him, and has monologued on the topic so many times, that the emotional power of the conflict has already been spent before Janus has even been resurrected.
Instead, Dracula once again finds himself hijacked by the haunted gothic house genre, only this time Janus, Frank Drake, and a psychic named Topaz are drawn into it as well. The house turns out to be yet another narrative feint, as all of these characters have actually been lured into Hell by Satan himself. Satan, it turns out, is not at all pleased at Dracula’s identity theft. We know it really is Satan, because who else could spend so many pages engaged in melodramatic monologue while Dracula barely gets a word in edgewise? By the end of Issue 64, Satan has inflicted an unthinkable punishment on Dracula: the vampire has now become human.