The Tragedy of the Naive Vampire Fan
Rather than try to wrest supernatural drama from nine months of Domini’s pregnancy, Wolfman uses the next several issues as an opportunity to set up important players and themes (the power of the Christ painting in the Chapel; the mysterious golden-skinned “demon” who has haunted Dracula for centuries), to advance subplots (Blade and the hunt for his mother’s killer), and to tell one-off stories that either broaden Dracula’s world or deepen our understanding of the character. A particularly bizarre example of this last approach tells an unusual Dracula story that balances on the edge of metafiction and fan fiction, but provides a clear message: Dracula does not deserve our love.
Issue 49 (with the strangely generic title “…And With the Word There Shall Come Death!”) sees Dracula returning home to a contented, very pregnant Domini, only to be suddenly surrounded by a glowing halo and transported “into some forgotten limbo!” After a check in on Blade’s sub-plot, the scene shifts to a woman sitting in an ornate, Gothic library, talking to her companion, who appears to be Frankenstein’s monster. [1]They are soon joined by D’Artagnan of the Three Musketeers, followed by Tom Sawyer and Injun Joe. They are all her “friends” whom she knows from her beloved stories. As D’Artagnan explains:
You created us, milady. We are a part of you, as we are a part of the books you took us from.
We are your joys and your sorrows, and we are your loves.
Is it any wonder, then, Madame, that we love you as much as you love us?
Or that we, mere words of fiction granted flesh and bone by the powers that are yours, know what secrets lie in your heart?
Her creations cannot help but know that she pines for the hero of her favorite novel, the man she has been unable to summon: Count Dracula:
I’ve dreamed […] of Dracula, with his arms about my shoulders, his powerful eyes reaching deeply into my own.
Oh, I have wished so long for him to join me here, and to give me his love.
At their encouragement, Miss Angie (as Tom Sawyer calls her) tries once again, this time with all their help and support, and Dracula finally materializes. He immediately believes Angie when she tells him that she summoned him, but has no patience for her feelings when she explains that she fell in love with him after reading “your book./ You were everything I could ever hope for in a man.” Dracula’s response is contemptuous: “That foolish novel Stoker half-based on my diary?”
Angie appeals to him as “the man Lucy Westenra loved.” But Dracula barely remembers Lucy: “Westenra? The name sounds familiar.” One of “a thousand tramps such as she,” Lucy “and all the others like her were merely sustenance for me.” Dracula does, however, intuit the mechanism by which Angie succeeded in summoning him this time after so many attempts. Angie “took me while I expressed the calmness [Domini] had given my soul for the first time in centuries.” In other words, at the moment when Dracula was completely content with letting a woman into his life as something more than “sustenance,” he inadvertently made himself vulnerable to Angie’s strange magic.
After Dracula slays D’Artagnan, Angie realizes that she “loved the Dracula I thought you were./ The man in the story. The man of strength, of power, of nobility!….You can’t be Dracula…not MY Dracula!” She burns the book, sending him home.
The last page delivers one final, Twilight Zone-style twist: we learn that Angie is actually a mental patient in a padded cell, clutching her copy of Stoker’s novel. The ward nurse notes that Angie always has an “attack” after reading “that awful vampire story.” An attendant replies:
“Let’s just leave her alone…to her fantasies.
They’re all she has now…all she loves anymore.
…Ever since the death of her husband and child threw her into that depressed state.
Angie is Wolfman’s model of the bad reader, not just of Dracula, but of Tomb of Dracula: seduced by “strength,” “power,” and “nobility,” she has duped herself into believe Stoker’s character was worthy of her love. But despite her rejection of the “real” Dracula, the comicbook protagonist has just as much claim on those qualities as did his literary precursor. Angie is blind to Dracula’s glaring moral failings, no matter how manifest they are on nearly every page of his adventures.
She is a bad reader, but she is also a powerful one: her love, her investment in the character, brings him to a life that he does not have on the page. The story’s framework marginalizes Angie as damaged and insane, but it nonetheless leaves open the possibility that her creative fan fiction might play a positive role in the workings of her own disturbed psyche. Meanwhile, Wolfman’s story both encourages and rejects a similar investment on the part of his own readers: we presumably don’t want to be deluded like Angie, but even the quiet scene with Dracula and Domini is an invitation to look kindly on a monster who ultimately doesn’t deserve the sympathy.
Note
[1] At the time, Marvel was still publishing its own adventure’s of the monster of Frankenstein; the version here is drawn with a general resemblance to the Marvel character, but distinct enough to suggest that this is no simple crossover.