Vampire’s Progress
Before we go any further, a brief outline of the series’ concluding arc is in order. Lupeski, still chafing at the loss of his status as unquestioned leader of the Satanists, is plotting against Dracula. He casts a spell on the noble earthbound alien Silver Surfer, prompting him to try to kill Dracula. Once again, it is Domini who intercedes and stops the violence. The Surfer is indignant: “But you are a good woman.. Don’t you know what he is?” Domini, with a reflection of the Christ painting visible in her eye, responds, “I know, and I know what he is doing. And I know what will happen in the end./ You need not punish him for what he is. Believe me.” The Surfer looks at the Christ painting, agrees that this is the “more fitting solution,” and flies off, leaving Dracula puzzled.
Later Lupeski tries to get Domini to take his side in the coming conflict with Dracula, but she refuses. Soon Dracula is pursued by a mysterious golden “demon” who has troubled him in the past. Dracula kills him, only to see the creature’s spirit rise and fly in to the satanic church, where the Christ painting now has eyes glowing exactly the same way his golden enemy’s did.
Domini goes into labor on Christmas Eve, and insists on being moved to the Dark Church to give birth. Meanwhile, Lupeski has been plotting with Rachel and co., arranging for them to kill Dracula the next day. But when Rachel and Dracula are in a standoff, Domini announces that the baby has been born, and insists that no one come to harm this night. The baby has the gold skin and red eyes of Dracula’s long-time antagonist.
The baby’s name, Janus, is announced at a ceremony that serves as another low-key power struggle between Dracula and Lupeski. Soon Lupeski plots with Rachel’s group again, and they attack Dracula’s with Lupeski’s open cooperation. Lupeski shoots at Dracula, but accidentally kills Janus. Dracula slowly crushes Lupeski’s skull. Yet again, Domini intervenes, preventing Dracula from killing his enemies. She then admits that she is following “Him” (the figure in the Christ painting, and calls upon Dracula to join her. Naturally, he refuses.
Dracula spends an entire issue in a psychotic rage over his son’s death, while Domini prepares for Janus’s resurrection. Janus lives again, but now takes the adult form of the golden-skinned “demon” and declares his intention to kill his father.
Their struggle eventually leads them to a strange haunted house, whereupon they are cast into hell at the behest of Satan himself, who is furious with Dracula for usurping his name. When Dracula finally leaves hell, he is horrified to discover that he is now human. After a series of humiliations, Satan turns him back into a vampire. But now he is no longer lord of the undead, and engages his replacement in a fight to the death. He wins, but wonders what point there is in being “lord over filthy woe-begotten trash!” Suddenly, he is confronted by Harker, who finally succeeds in killing Dracula.
It would be wrong to assert that a quick summary of the last two years of Tomb of Dracula does the series injustice. If the accumulation of plot sounds frantic and absurd, this is for good reason. But what is obscured in such a summary is the emotional resonance of the comic’s twists and turns. In the brief interval between Janus’s birth (Issue 54) and his death (Issue 59), Dracula experience a state of calm vulnerability that previously would have been unthinkable. And, indeed, it’s all but undepictable; of the four issues bookended by his son’s birth and death, one (56) is comic fanfiction (the terrible vampire novel penned by Wolfman’s least inspired addition to the cast, the nebbishy writer Harold H. Harold), another (58) is a standalone Blade story from which Dracula is absent, while a third (57), save for the inclusion of some subplots, is a stand-alone Dracula tale that could have been placed virtually anywhere in the series 70-issue run.
So the entire emotional weight of the changes in Dracula’s life is conveyed in Issue 55 (“Requiem for a Vampire”), an issue whose complete lack of violent action was surely responsible for its bland and generic cover. [1] Dracula and Domini are discussing Janus’s strange coloring, only to be interrupted by Lupeski. After only a few minutes of conversation with him, Dracula reverts to melodramatic type. Carried away by his fantasy of controlling the world through religion, he shouts, “I shall become an emperor! / With the power to dispose of any dissidents with a mere nod. With the power to destroy any who dare interfere with my plans. /My demand is absolute domination. I will settle for nothing less!” Dracula is not wrong to focus on conflict, as, just a few pages later, he thwarts Lupeski’s attempt to have the church center its devotion on Janus rather than the baby’s father.
Dracula’s declaration is something of a thesis statement for the rest of the series. Or perhaps its research question: does Dracula truly want absolute domination? And if he gets it, will he be satisfied? Thanks to his self-confidence and his propensity for monologue, Dracula gives the impression that he knows himself well. But given time to elaborate, he tends to start a process of introspection that is usually cut short.
After Dracula fends off Lupeski’s indirect challenge to his leadership, he and Domini have a serious conversation that lasts six pages (an eternity by superhero comics standards). He wanted a son, and now he has one. But all he can think about are his previous offspring, all of whom disappointed him: “I come from a large family, one with many brothers. Their children worshiped them—/—while mine have ever sought to destroy me.” In one of Dracula’s few truly reciprocal conversations that does not end in his interlocutor’s death, Domini points out how different their experiences are:
But I think you’ve never truly understood me, or how I lived my life unloved, alone. […]
Your life has been one lived through strength—mine has been a life of weakness.
Leaving the convent for Lupeski’s church proved to be an exchange of one set of humiliations for another: “Do you know what it means when you believe you are less than the dirt you walk on?” She agreed to be the bride of Satan in order to “return some shred of dignity to me./ I would be someone again, Dracula, I desperately wanted that.” When she realized Dracula was not the devil, it didn’t matter:
You were a man, you had power blazing in your deep-set eyes, and I knew there was something special about you.
And I was in love, even though I later learned what you actually were. You see, for some reason, that didn’t matter to me. I loved you and only that was important.
And I know that in the beginning I didn’t matter at all to you. I was only a means to your end, but you see, you meant the same to me in my indefinable way.
You were able to make me into something more that special.
And maybe that made me love you even more.
And I think, perhaps, my love for you made you care for me.
I’m your wife. I’ve had your child/ I know what you were, what you are, what you will always be.
I-I know what will soon happen to us. I know what will happen to young Janus.
There will be pain, and there will be tears. There will even be fire between us all.
But Dracula, I love you…I love you with all my heart and soul.
On the surface, their conversation is a mutual confession of the hopes and fears that have guided their lives. But it is also not a dialogue; instead, it is one monologue (Dracula’s) followed by an even longer one (Domini’s). First Dracula reveals his vulnerability, and then Domini discusses her own. The difference, though, is that Domini wears her weakness on her sleeve, while Dracula must always project strength. Domini’s story starts out as one of passivity, but by the end, it is the tale of how her submission to Dracula led to her conquest of his heart. By now, not only has Wolfman succeeded in conveying why someone like Domini would love Dracula, he has also show why Dracula would love her. His love, however, is an implicit refutation of his earlier thesis: total domination is not what is actually making him happy. A lesson he learns from a woman whose very name reminds us of “domination."
When the issue ends, Dracula pushes aside all the questions that hound him, performing the vampire equivalent of counting his blessings:
For, I know my wife loves me, and I know I have a child who will make me proud.
And, for perhaps the first time in five long centuries—
—perhaps I have finally found that ever-elusive thing men call peace!
Note that nowhere on this list of things that have afforded him this rare sense of contentment is “absolute domination.” Once again, Dracula has come perilously close to true self-knowledge, but he fails to make the connection between his domestic contentment and forgetting, however briefly, his plans for conquest.
Of course, that equanimity vanishes with Janus’s death in issue 59. It is also the moment when the difference between Dracula and Domini, construed as positive just four months ago, become irreconcilable. Cradling Janus’s corpse, she turns not to Dracula, but to the Christ painting, in a monologue ending with the words “Why must vengeance be yours?” [2] To which Dracula retorts: “Bah! Vengeance is mine! Mine, Domini! Mine!” Now Domini is in open rebellion, commanding Harker’s band to leave and forbidding her husband to harm them. Domini explains that she is acting not on her own authority, but that of the Christ painting. “Him? “ Dracula shouts. “Do you dare tell me you listen to him?”
Domini assures him of her love, and implores him to join her: “Please, come here. Embrace me, and accept his words. He will show you the way.” Dracula is appalled:
After all the time…you simply do not understand me.
You can’t understand what I’ve become, and why I can’t do what you ask me to do!
Lord help me…I can’t
Still in love with her husband, Domini is also the Dracula fan whose morals would ruin the comic if she had her way. Of course Dracula cannot join her. But his last words are inadvertently ambiguous. Since when does a vampire say “Lord help me”?
Notes
[1] On the cover, Dracula stands outside the dark couch, the moon behind him somehow showing the image of a skull. He stares straight ahead, pointing his right index finger, and says “Gaze into the eyes of Dracula, human fool—/and see your death!” Thankfully, no such scene appears in the comic.
[2] Here and elsewhere in Tomb of Dracula, Wolfman’s command of Christian theology appears shaky. The original source for the vengeance quote is Deuteronomy 32:35, though it is repeated in a different context in Romans 12:19. Christ is not typically associated with revenge.