The Lifecycle of Vlad Dracula
It is not enough that Dracula not be worthy of sympathy; Tomb of Dracula is built on the tension between the protagonist’s evil nature and the narrative machinery that compels reader identification. Had Wolfman chosen simply to make Dracula the villain and Harker’s crew the heroes, Dracula could have remained a one-dimensional monster whose destruction would be an unmitigated good. Instead, the comic insists on multiple, conflicting points of reader identification based on the competing subjectivities of its characters.
This is why the repeated, one-on-one confrontations between Dracula and Quincy Harker work so well, in that each one of them has an accessible inner life, and each one demands some measure of reader identification. Quincy’s decades-long quest, the multiple sacrifices he has endured, and the pervasive sense of mourning that surrounds him make him the comic’s ethical heart, but Dracula’s arrogant narcissism, punctuated occasional and effectively by moments of melancholy self-doubt, make it difficult to accord him the hate that he deserves.
Their conflict is enhanced by the fact that they represent such divergent points in the human lifecycle. Technically, Dracula is, of course, much older, but it is Quincy who was born at the end of Stoker’s novel, and in the 1970s, it is Quincy who is obviously not long for this world. Dracula, on the other hand, though already dead, is potentially eternal. In the time between the original novel and the last issues of the series, Quincy has experience every stage of a human life, while Dracula remains unmarked by the passage of time.
The last three years of Tomb of Dracula are a challenge to its title character: can the vampire actually change and grow? During the first 40 issues, Dracula’s plans and goals may evolve, but the character himself is frozen in place. Indeed, he is one of the rare comicbook characters whose diegetic lifespan actually makes sense when compared to the time over which the comic itself is serialized. In his “Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco argues that the superhero lives in an “oneiric climate,” an “iterative present” that allows time to pass, but cannot allow the hero himself to change very much; as a serialized commodity that must remain forever available for further exploitation, the superhero cannot be allowed to be “consumed” by the narrative. Hence the phenomenon known as “Marvel Time.” Though the Fantastic Four’s original space flight was depicted in 1961, the characters cannot be permitted to age; otherwise, the teenage Johnny Storm would be around 75 in 2019. “Marvel Time” is a sliding time-scale; at any given point in a Marvel comic after the early 1970s, the Fantastic Four always gained their powers ten years earlier. But Dracula is immune to narrative consumption; as an undead vampire, he already embodies the ideal temporality of Marvel Comics. Learning in 2012 that Dracula was active in 1972 and hasn’t changed in the slightest requires no cognitive dissonance on the part of the reader. [1]
The storyline that begins with Dracula’s discovery of Lupeski’s Satanic church alters this dynamic, by bringing a time-bound change to Dracula’s life, guaranteeing more change in the future. With his marriage to Domini, Dracula remains a vampire, but is now suddenly on a path that at least mimics a human life. Wedded to a human woman and father to a semi-human son, he is now time-bound. For an immortal creature, this is either an existential threat or an unexpected opportunity.
Dracula as family man is an idea that sounds terrible, yet it is the sheer inappropriateness of this development that is the key to the last 25 issues of Tomb of Dracula. In Domini, he has found a woman who quickly shows that she understands him, and even seems to accept him for who he is without herself becoming evil. Thanks to Domini’s influence, Dracula repeatedly displays uncharacteristic mercy, declining to kill Rachel and Frank on the day his son is born and on the day of his death. In Issue 48, a vampire named Marianne tells him and Domini the story of a life haunted by Dracula from the very beginning, and an undeath now rendered lonely by the demise of her vampire husband. She asks Dracula “the one who began this cycle of horror for me—/—to end it now and forever…and to let me be with my husband for eternity.” Dracula’s response:
Once, many years ago, it seems now, I would not have understood your request.
But now, with my wife Domini at my side, I can understand such things as peace and rest and love.
Yes, I will kill you, woman. And may your ashes rest In peace…forever!
Could the Lord of Vampires be going soft? And if so, should he? Though Tomb of Dracula is short on subtlety, and though the series had been running for at least a year before it showed evidence of anything resembling a long-term plan, in the final third of its run, the comic anticipates the ethical complexities raised by the antihero dramas that would dominate premium cable two decades later. Both HBO’s The Sopranos and AMC’s Breaking Bad centered on compelling protagonists whose cruelty and criminality are offset by brilliant writing and acting. Both Tony Soprano and Walter White commit acts of horrific violence that one might expect would render them entirely unsympathetic, and yet viewers found themselves invested in these men’s success.
The Sopranos in particular modeled the audience’s problematic identification with Tony through his years-long therapeutic relationship with Dr. Jennifer Melfi. Charmed and repulsed by her patient, Dr. Melfi is always in danger of losing sight of Tony’s moral failings. As she is caught up in the Freudian web of transference and counter-transference, she becomes a proxy for the viewer’s own conflict between ethics and emotional investment. Only in the last season does she become convinced that Tony is a malignant narcissist, and therefore untreatable.
The comparison of Tomb of Dracula and The Sopranos might appear outlandish, and not only because the Lord of Vampires never trades in his coffin for an analyst’s couch. The Sopranos was the lynchpin in a campaign to give television the air of respectability it had so long lacked (“It’s not TV. It’s HBO”). Tomb of Dracula, with its cheesy title and melodramatic dialogue, could only aspire to the status of guilty pleasure. Ironically for a show dramatizing psychotherapy, The Sopranos offered pleasure without guilt. Or at least without aesthetic guilt; ethically, viewers were set up to be conflicted and disturbed.
Nonetheless, Marv Wolfman’s Dracula causes the same narrative conundrum as David Chase’s Tony Soprano: each hero must both charm and repulse, leaving the reader/viewer in an unstable position. And if each narrative does fundamentally recognize its protagonist as a destructive force, both the comic and the television show help the audience defer ethical judgment by holding out the possibility that the protagonist might somehow get better, or even reform, a goal that always recedes the closer he gets to it. Redemption is a limit case that must be approached, but never reached.[2]
Notes
[1] As it so happens, the character has changed significantly, especially in his visual depiction. But this is a function of “the times” rather than time; his look was updated presumably to make him seem less old-fashioned. In story, there is no acknowledgment that any changes has been effected at all.
[2] While I’m in the business of making patently ridiculous comparisons, the deferral of redemption replicates the dynamic established by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment: the would-be superman Raskolnikov is compelling precisely because of his morally bankrupt theorizing. Dostoevsky the moralist must have Raskolnikov turn to Christ for redemption, but Dostoevsky the novelist knows that this is a moment that cannot be part of the story he has been telling for hundreds of pages. The epilogues end with Raskolnikov about to open the Bible, but not with him reading it and becoming a Christian.