Vampire Meets Wolfman
Chapter 2:
Blood Will Tell: Marv Wolfman's Tomb of Dracula
Vampire Meets Wolfman
The Lee/Kirby and Lee/Ditko comics of the 1960s made interiority a key component to the new Marvel superhero formula. In the 1970s, most of the progress made in conveying subjectivity, an inner life, and a distinct voice tended to happen at the margins of Marvel’s superhero line, rather than at the center (with Steve Englehart’s work as a notable exception). This was, at least in part, a function of the changes in the market and the industry. In 1968, Marvel finally freed itself from the onerous restrictions put on it by its distributor, Independent News; no longer limited to a fixed number of titles, the company could bring as many comics to the newsstand as it wanted. In 1971, the Comics Code Authority (CCA) revised the rules to allow the inclusion of “classic” or “literary” monsters (such as Frankenstein and Dracula), though not their low-rent brethren (zombies were still forbidden, but many writers snuck them over the CCA border wall with false papers identifying them as “zuvembies”). Under Roy Thomas’s leadership as editor-in-chief (1972-1974), more new writers and artists began to work for the company, bringing fresh perspectives.
One of Thomas’ newcomers, Marv Wolfman, would be closely identified with Marvel throught the decade, even serving briefly as editor-in-chief (1975-1976). Yet Wolfman’s legacy at Marvel’s is uneven. Having worked at DC before joining the rival team, he would ultimately make his greatest mark on comics upon returning to Mavel’s main competitor in 1980. There he and his fellow Marvel refugee, fan-favorite artist George Perez, would bring a Marvel sensibility (emotional soap-opera, slowly-simmering plots) to The New Teen Titans. Titans would be one of the decade’s biggest hits, eventually spawning two animated television series, two tie-in animated movies, and a live-action Titans series on DC’s streaming service. In 1985, Wolfman and Perez launched the 12-issue Crisis on Infinite Earths, which redefined the entire DC universe while setting a pattern for similar, though usually less-satisfying, reality-altering crossovers in the years to come. Wolfman’s impact on DC Comics is undeniable.
At Marvel, the company where Wolfman built the reputation that made his hiring by DC something of a coup, Wolfman’s work is a mixed bag. Actually, it’s not even that. With one exception, it’s a study in sticking to the middle of the road. Wolfman handled some of Marvels’ biggest properties (though not all of them were big at the time): Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, Luke Cage, and Doctor Strange. Yet none of these runs is particularly significant or even memorable. True, he did create some characters who went on to do very well for themselves (Bullseye, Nova), but nothing about Wolfman’s own handling of them would have suggested that they were destined for greatness. Curiously, the man who established his reputation as one of DC’s top superhero scribes, who helped the company rescue its books from mediocrity, never excelled with the characters who redefined the modern superhero.
Instead, Wolfman wrote just one Marvel series that stood out from the crowd, and it was about as far from superheroes as one could get: Tomb of Dracula. Part of Marvel’s post-1971 horror boom, it shares the unfortunate flaw that hinders so many of the comics to be discussed in this book: an off-putting or embarrassing title. Quite simply, there is no reason to expect that a comic called “Tomb of Dracula” would be fondly remembered decades later, and yet it is commonly acknowledged as one of Marvel’s best publications of the decade.
OR, YOU KNOW, JUST BUY A SUBSCRIPTION
It certainly did not start out that way. Running for a total of 70 issues from 1972-1979, Tomb of Dracula began with a simple, uninspired premise. Dead for decades, Dracula is found and revived in 1972 by a group including the Count’s last human descendant, Frank Drake. The comic began as the most basic expression of its high concept, with little evidence of any kind of authorial investment beyond the outstanding pencils of Gene Colan (who drew every issue of the series, almost always inked by Colan's ideal complement,Tom Palmer ). This wasn’t even a comic written by committee; instead, it was the product of an ongoing game of musical chairs. The first six issues were credited to three different writers, none of whom left much of an impression (though Gardner Fox’s introduction of Rachel Van Helling, a descendent of the novel’s original vampire hunter, would prove significant down the road). Wolfman took over with issue 7, though, by his own admission, several months passed before he got his bearings (Daniels).
That it took so long for the title to find its direction should come as no surprise. Not only did Tomb of Dracula constitute a step away from the genre that had defined Marvel for the past decade, it also was one of the first attempts in the era of the Comics Code to publish a series centered around a villain rather than a hero. While this is obviously a problem of genre, it also has serious ramifications for the question of subjectivity. For years, Stan Lee and his collaborators told stories about characters who looked like monsters, but whose inner nobility made them admirable Now we were dealing with monsters who were truly monstrous through and through. How can the writer humanize a monster without humanizing him too much? How does the writer get inside the head of someone evil without holding him up to the reader for admiration?
Wolfman answered these questions in two seemingly-contradictory ways, delving deeper into Dracula’s psyche and past in order to make him feel more real to his readers, and surrounding the vampire with an ensemble of human characters who could bear the burden of reader identification and emotional investment. Already hunted by Frank Drake, Rachel Van Helsing, and her mute companion Taj, Dracula would soon be the target of a larger network run by Quincy Harker (the now-elderly son of Jonathan and Mina from the original novel), Quincy’s daughter Edith (best not to get too attached to her), and Wolfman and Colan’s breakout character Blade. The last half of the series saw the cast expand to include humans who were not part of the vampire-hunting team, most notably Dracula’s new wife, Domini.
The ensemble approach was not unique to Tomb of Dracula. On the contrary, it proved to be the default for many of the new genre comics Marvel had begun to produce, particularly those centered on monsters. As we shall see in the Gerber chapter, N’Kantu the Living Mummy could barely speak, while the swamp creature called Man-Thing was not just nonverbal, but actually mindless. Unless these series were going to be a set of largely disconnected episodes, other ongoing characters were going to have to pick up the slack.
MEET THE SCOOBY GANG
In the case of Tomb of Dracula, however, the construction of the ensemble had roots in richer soil than that provided by Marvel Comics. While most readers were more likely to know about the vampire from the endless series of movies featuring him, Tomb of Dracula situated itself firmly within the continuity established by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. The names of some of the characters (Harker, Van Helsing) reinforce this connection, but, consciously or not, Wolfman began to develop his series in the manner established by the novel. Though Dracula featured the vampire prominently enough to use his name as its title, the book kept the character at a distance from the reader. More object than subject, Dracula is refracted through the perceptions of numerous viewpoint characters, most notably Jonathan and Mina. Moreover, the novel, so famously preoccupied with media and technology, is a virtual compendium of all the different means by which the story of Dracula can be recorded and transmitted: journals, shorthand, wax cylinder recordings, newspaper articles. A foreign element and dangerous pathogen, Dracula in Stoker’s novel is not just a communicable disease, but a disease of communication.
Tomb of Dracula devotes a significant amount of narrative effort to conveying the effects the vampire has had on those he encounters (primarily, those who survive his encounters; his effect on the others is self-evident). The original writers use Dracula’s descendent, Frank Drake, as the initial point of identification, but Drake proves unsuited to the task: spoiled, whiny, and despondent, Frank Drake is almost as unpleasant as the Count, but with none of the charisma. Small wonder that when Archie Goodwin takes over as writer with issue 3, he has Frank attempt suicide.