The second and concluding chapter of Marvel Comics’ 1973 crossover between Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night introduces itself with a spectacular cover by Mike Ploog: one that epitomizes Marvel’s early-’70s horror trend as well or better than any other I can think of; and, truth be told, one of my very favorite covers in any genre from this particular era of comics.
Beyond the cover, writer Marv Wolfman, penciller Ploog, and inker Frank Chiaramonte pick up the story right where Wolfman, penciller Gene Colan, and inker Tom Palmer left off at the end of ToD #18, with our two series’ protagonists quite literally at each other’s throats:
In our Tomb of Dracula #18 post, we made note of the practice Marvel had at this time of getting two pages out of their artists for the price of one, by requiring the penciller to turn one art board sideways and draw it so it could be reproduced over two pages. In the ToD issue in question, the third and second pages from the end — showing the beginning of the fight between Dracula and the Werewolf — were created this way; WbN #15 flips that a full 180 degrees, as the battle continues over the second and third pages from the beginning — pages that have been crafted in the same one-page-turned-horizontal fashion:
As with the Tomb of Dracula example, the artwork produced this way isn’t bad, exactly; nevertheless, it has a “blown up” feeling that, at least for this reader, is somewhat off-putting. In any case, I think we can all be glad that Marvel dropped this particular method of cost-cutting relatively quickly.
Drained by Topaz’s magical whammy, Dracula is in need to a quick pick-me-up — which he finds in the form of an unfortunate young woman walking alone through the countryside. Meanwhile, Topaz leads the Werewolf out of the castle, intent on them both being long gone by the time Dracula returns home. As they go, she muses about how much difficulty she had in attempting to control the Count: “There was a strength in his mind that I’ve never encountered before… a force of will… a power that seemed to be constantly exploding within him.”
The suggestion that Dracula experiences “inner turmoil and conflict” is a provocative one — and also somewhat curious, as this is not a theme that we see Marv Wolfman doing much with in Tomb of Dracula itself, at least not during this period.
Dracula-hunters Frank Drake and Rachel van Helsing hadn’t made an appearance in Tomb of Dracula #18, despite being regular characters in that series; as noted in the earlier post, this saved artists Colan and Palmer from having to work to keep them distinct from the rather similar-looking Jack Russell and Topaz. Ploog doesn’t get off so easy; but, in general, he does a good job of distinguishing between the couples (with support from colorist Petra Goldberg, who consistently gives Rachel and Topaz different shades of blonde hair).
The scene shifts to rejoin Jack and Topaz hours later — well after sunup, naturally, so that our hero is once again his human self — as they return to the conundrum of how to read Jack’s father’s diary, which is banded in steel and locked. Fortunately, Topaz is ultimately able to use her powers to open the lock…
In the early days of Tomb of Dracula, as well as its companion magazine Dracula Lives, the slaying of Dracula by Rachel van Helsing’s forebear Abraham — as chronicled in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, as well as most adaptations of that work in other media — had been treated as a highly singular event — if not the one and only time that Dracula had been taken out of action since he was originally made a vampire centuries earlier, then close to it. More recently, however, the tendency had been to contextualize the climax of Stoker’s novel as just one of many times the undead Count had seemingly been dispatched forever, only to rise again. So, in the present flashback, our storytellers give us a Dracula slaying in 1795, without feeling any pressing need to explain right away how he happened to come back from this one.
This version of how lycanthropy came to run in Jack Russell’s family doesn’t quite jibe with earlier information that had been presented in Werewolf by Night #3, where we readers had been told that “a demon which had lain dormant” in the Russoff bloodline “for nigh on eighteen centuries” had been awakened when Jack’s dad translated and read an ancient grimoire known as the Darkhold, resulting in his turning into a werewolf for the first time. Oh, well.
While all this has been going on, our other ginger-and-blonde duo have holed up at a local inn, where they’re laying their own plans to go after Drac. But it’s already nighttime again, and even as Frank and Rachel converse, a strange bluish mist slips into their room from under a window…
Dracula refers to the Russoff diary as “the Second Book of Sins” — apparently an allusion to how the Darkhold (the ancient grimoire once owned by Jack’s father) has previously been called “the Book of Sins” by a couple of different characters (starting with the “mad monk” Aelfric in Werewolf by Night #3). Later stories would establish that a large portion of the Darkhold’s contents had been transcribed into the Russoff diary, making it essentially another copy of that tome; here, however, Dracula seems to be making a clear distinction between the diary and “the ancient Darkhold scrolls”. And why does our favorite Count fear the Second Book of Sins? How does it “threaten the very life of the Lord of Vampires“? Alas, we won’t learn the answers to those questions in this issue… though I’ll go ahead and note that when they do come, they don’t seem to have anything to do with the mysterious ability of the werewolf named Lydia, and those she’s passed her curse on to (like the Russoffs/Ruseells), to resist Dracula’s control.
Back at Russoff Manor, as Jack and Topaz wait for the full moon to rise, he asks her to use her powers to allow his mind to be in control during the time he’s transformed — this way, he figures, he’ll have at least a chance against Dracula. Topaz tells him it’ll be a strain, but she’ll do her best…
The battle continues until Dracula realizes that the Werewolf doesn’t have the book he wants at all — rather, it’s currently in the possession of Topaz. Abandoning the fight, he moves swiftly to confront the young woman…
And so ends our crossover. As I mentioned in last month’s discussion of ToD #18, I thought that that first chapter had been somewhat marred by careless writing on Marv Wolfman’s part; while the writer doesn’t completely avoid that problem in WbN #15, on the whole I’d sat that he, Ploog, and Chiaramonte have yetmanaged to deliver a mostly satisfying conclusion to the story.
Although, of course, it’s not really the ending. As the last caption in the final panel indicates, Dracula’s pursuit of Rachel van Helsing, and the Second Book of Sins, would continue in Tomb of Dracula #19, which was originally released in December, 1973, the same month as Werewolf by Night #15. We’re not going to be able to cover all the events of that issue here — still, we wouldn’t want to leave you wondering forever about the mysteries of the Russoff diary, and why Drac was so distressed at the thought of it falling into his enemies’ hands. So, here’s the skinny on the Second Book of Skins, as finally revealed by none other than Dracula himself on page 5 of this issue: it contains “a spell to utterly destroy all vampires”. And what becomes of the book? Well, it crashes into a mountain, along with Dracula and Rachel, after Drac finally catches up with the helicopter and, rather ill-advisedly, tosses its pilot to his death. But while the helicopter is totaled, its passengers — and cargo — are more fortunate, as shown below (text by Marv Wolfman; art by Gene Colan and Tom Palmer):
So, yeah; after all that, Dracula just throws the book away. (Over a decade and a half later, it would be revealed in Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #9 that the Second Book of Sins was ultimately recovered by Morgan Le Fey, and then by somewhat murky means came into the possession of Modred the Mystic… yeah, now that you mention it, the history of the Darkhold is pretty damn complicated.) Rachel, however, he hangs onto, realizing that he might need her for sustenance before he can make it back to civilization (and more plentiful human prey). We won’t go into details here, but please rest assured that both woman and vampire eventually make it out of the frozen Transylvanian wilderness alive (so to speak), to resume their ongoing war in the months (and issues) to come.
As for Werewolf by Night — as the aforementioned final caption promised, issue #16 would bring “a new menace”, in the form of a (not actually the) “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, as Jack and Topaz made a stop in Paris on their return trip home from Europe. Then it was back to sunny L.A., CA, where — as you may recall from last month’s Werewolf by Night #14 post — our hero still had the enmity of the Committee to deal with, along with the question of whether his younger sister Lissa would succumb to the family curse on her own approaching eighteenth birthday — plus, naturally, any number of new challenges neither he nor his readers could even yet guess at.
And it would be a new team of creators who’d be shepherding our hirsute hero through those challenges, the old as well as the new. Marv Wolfman’s relatively short tenure as writer, which had begun with issue #11, ended with #15, while Mike Ploog’s return to the feature he’d helped launch in the summer of 1971 sadly lasted only four issues, concluding with #16. Mike Friedrich would serve a brief stint as writer from issues #16 through #19 before turning the job over to Doug Moench; concurrently, Don Perlin would take over as penciller with #17. Working in tandem from #20 on, Moench and Perlin would remain on the series all the way up to the last issue, #43, which came out in December, 1976 — a remarkably long run by a single creative team, at least by the standards of the time.
I must have enjoyed the first year’s worth of Moench-Perlin Werewolf by Night stories reasonably well (though I honestly can’t recall right now what a single one of them was about), as I continued to buy the title faithfully up through issue #30 — choosing to bail just two issues before the creators introduced a brand-new costumed antagonist for the Werewolf: a mysterious mercenary supposedly in the employ of our old friends the Committee, who called himself Moon Knight.
(Yeah, my timing wasn’t exactly the greatest, there.)
But as we come to the end of this post, let’s drop back to December, 1973, when I was still a happy purchaser of Werewolf by Night, Tomb of Dracula, and most of Marvel’s other horror titles. The horror boom in American comics was still going strong, then — which meant that in addition to having traditional monsters like werewolves starring in their own solo features, you were also likely to see them crossing genre boundaries to mix it up with superheroes. The way that one particular lycanthrope would do with DC Comics’ Batman before the month’s end — a tale we’ll be looking at in our last post of 2023, coming just one week from today.
As this post is going up on December 23, your humble blogger would like to wish a very merry Christmas to all who celebrate… and a highly enjoyable long weekend to any who don’t! 😉
You have a great Christmas too Alan. I’d say ‘I hope Santa brings you some great books’…but it seems like you already own them all 🙂
The odd thing was how much Kane/Palmer drew Rachel Van Helsing to look like MASH’s Loretta Swit on the cover of ToD $19. Given how popular MASH was, I assume it was an intentional “Easter Egg,” as Kane was famous for using photoes of actors and politicians as models for characters
(Hal Jordan was based on Kane’s former neighbor, Paul Newman, Sinestro was based on David Niven, Ray Palmer was based on Robert Taylor and the Guardians of the Universe on then-Israeli PM Ben-Gurian. James Cagney, Edward G, Robinson and Jason Robards, Jr, often were models for supporting charactors, Some say Kane based the hero of His Name Is Savage on Lee Marvin in The Killers l1964] and Point Blank l1967], although the cover artisy for the paited cover took the resemblance up to about “15.”)
Many artists, before and after Kane, have carried on that tradition of using thinly disguised celebs as reference for characters. I have seen Bernie Krigstein draw Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald in a late 1940s story. Frank Frazetta added a moustache to Cary Grant in one of his 1950s romance comic stories, and drew an amalgam of himself and Ernest Borgnine(!) in “Werewolf!” Creepy #1 in 1964.
Neal Adams’ Bruce Wayne of 1970 -74 bore a more than passing resemblance to George Lazenby who played James Bond in 1969’s “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Then in Batman #244 he has Sean Connery’s chest hair (talk about a Bond mashup!). There was a GL/GA issue where the villains were obviously based on Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, US president and VP at the time.
Alex Toth based a supporting character in Hot Wheels in the early 70s on Beau Bridges as he appeared in “For Love of Ivy.” Toth, of course, based Bravo for Adventure’s Jesse Bravo on Errol Flynn, and supporting characters on C. Aubrey Smith and Katharine Hepburn.
David Mazzucchelli based his Bruce Wayne in Batman: Year One on a young Gregory Peck. In more recent decades there has been at least one artist who based Matt Murdock on a young Robert Redford. And I’ve seen Brad Pitt as a character basis in Gen13, drawn either by Adam Hughes or Travis Charest (only saw it in passing 20 years ago or more).
The list is far larger than that, but now – with the exception of Samuel L. Jackson – most celebs want royalties for the use of their likeness in mainstream comics.
As for Dracula, Christopher Lee’s face has obviously popped up in a number of ’70s comics about the character.
Didn’t Gene Colan base Marvel’s Dracula on Jack Palance, a few years before Palance did an adoptation for Dan Curtis on CBS in late 1973?
Alex Ross based the older Bruce Wayne on the older Gregory Peck in Kingdom Come. He akso based his Reed Richards in Marvels on the actor who played the Professor, Russell Johnson.
It might just be me, but I would not use a young Robert Redford as a model for Matt (Daredevil) Murdock. I;d use someone more “ethnic,” like Matt Damon or George Clooney or (really reaching back) James Cagney..
Alex Ross used Fred McMurray for Captain Marvel (Shazam) and Michael Keaton for Sub-Mariner in Kingdom Come and Marvels. There are so many more, of course.
Dave Stevens used himself as Cliff Secord, the Rocketeer, and Bettie Page as Betty, and Doug (“Jonny Quest” creator) Wildey as Peevey.
Big Red Cheese co-creator CC Beck modeled Cap on Fred MacMurray back in 1940, which I’m sure Ross knew.
Not coincidentally (I imagine), Astro City’s The Gentleman is a Captain Marvel riff who looks like MacMurray.
Fred MacMurray eventually returned the favor by donning a Captain Marvel costume in a dream sequence in one of his films after Fawcet had stopped publishing.
And Jonah Hex was evidently based on Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, though with a few grotesque modifications.
Enjoyed reading your take on this particular monster mash that I missed a half-century ago. I think this was the only time I saw versions of Frank and Rachel drawn by anyone but Gene Colan! Ploog certainly did a great job, but particularly with Rachel I couldn’t help thinking the face didn’t quite match Colan’s version. But then, I also get that feeling when seeing some more recent renderings of characters whose exploits I’d read regularly decades ago but hadn’t kept up with and seeing versions of even Peter Parker and Mary Jane that are wildly off models from their looks from the 1960s through the early ’80s. Funny, to my elder mind at least, how Transylvania, much like Salem, MA, has become so embedded in our culture as realms of horror, such that it’s not only made out to be Dracula’s home (despite that the historical Dracula, despite having been born in Transylvania, actually ruled Wallachia) but in Marvel Comics Transylvania was also the ancestral home of the Werewolf, and in this cross-over both wind up there fighting over a book! And seems Wolfman didn’t deal at all with the then current reality of Transylvania being within a totalitarian Communist nation. It was just a part of the Never Never Land make-believe version of Europe, wherein so many Americans just happened to have ancestors who owned castles of which they were the last heirs, etc., rather than being descendants of the serfs who had to work for the tyrannical overlords living in the castles. Maybe Marv should have revealed that Frank & Jack looked so similar due to having a common ancestor in Transylvania, which would not have been outlandish at all if they were both descendants of royal families in the same region — would have been more unusual if they didn’t have a relatively recent common ancestor (and not Dracula!).
Just some idle musings this Saturday morning as a I begin my 4 day weekend, getting both X-Mas day and the day after off. Happy holidays, Alan!
It’s an excellent question you raise.
Right before Dracula (the historic one upon whom both Stocker and Marvel’s is based) had power as an Ottoman vassel (and occasional opponent), other people and entities were in charge . Where Dracula’s family had stood under the old Kingdom of Hungary, I don’t know; I assume they were at least among the warrior/landowner class:, nobility or gentry. The Ottoman (and before that, Mongol), conquests in the late middle ages had upset the apple cart.
By the time Baron Russoff has his unfortunate meeting with Lydia in 1795, the area is under control of what will be known for the next 9 years or so as the Holy Roman Empire, generally ruked by the Hapsburghs. The Hapsburghs were Austrians (who also had a Spanish branch) and their nobility was a mix of Italians, Swiss, Germans, Slavs and others who had been of civil (nobility of the robe) or military service (nobility of the sword) to the Hapsburghs. In addition, the Hapsburghs ahd just gained considerable land as the result of the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Confederation (the same transactiom that gave the Romanovs most of the Ukraine). So, Barron Russoff might be a Polish noble, who was given richer land in Hungary for service to the Hapsburhs or he might be a German noble (whose ancestors were Slavs) who served the Hapsburghs well.
Russoff might know about Dracuala as a member of the local gentry, but he might be originally from Poland or German or Austria and is willing to stand up to Dracula since he has no connection.
Long story short, there was not necessarily any connections between the families that ruled a given area afew centuries apart, especially during periods of political transition and war
King Charles III of the UK claims direct descent from Vlad Dracula, which sounds odd but not entirely impossible. There was a lot of inter-marriage and breeding among nearly all the royal families of Europe, with some tragic consequences for several individuals, particularly members of the Hapsburgs and a few descendants of Queen Victoria, including her great-grandson Alexei, heir-apparent to the Russian throne.
https://buffalonews.com/king-charles-is-relatdracula/article_279e6a79-a5f9-544d-8f19-864bfbe5372e.html#:~:text=King%20Charles%20is%20believed%20to, his%20Prince%20of%20Wales%20Foundation: https://nypost.com/2022/09/16/what-do-king-charles-and-dracula-have-in-common/
A real bood relative , , , ,
Well, I missed this one fifty years ago, but I didn’t read monster books back then. Now, however, considering how much more mature and egalitarian I am, I can admit this wasn’t a bad read, even though Wolfman rushes from one plot point to another like he’s on fire (or running out of pages).
As for the art, Ploog is wonderful as always, though I always expect the Wolfman to be much larger than Ploog draws him when compared to other people. The modern werewolf you read about in stories these days are usually seven feet tall and 350lbs and Jack seems so puny in comparison.
I’m assuming at the end, the Darkhold–or Book of Sins–which is a much cooler name, was sentient enough to bespell Dracula to keep from destroying it. You didn’t say for sure, Alan, but why else would he finally find the book that could kill him and just toss it away?
As to the resemblance between Frank and Jack and Rachel and Topaz, the colorist certainly saved the day on that one. Trust me, the difficulties of keeping the likeness of some of these characters on brand from panel to panel and comic to comic with different artists is no easy thing, especially given the deadlines Ploog and other worked on in those days.
I guess that does it for 2023, Alan. Merry Christmas to all who observe such things, and of course, Happy Saturnalia to all my pagan friends. Peace.
To me, the clasic example is the Sekowsky/Sachs JLA. Hal Jordan, Ray Palmer and John Jones were idnticle when not in super-hero mode.
Zero interest then or now in WbN, but I always have to check out your posts, Alan–Merry Christmas to you!
Universal’s 1930s and 1940s movies were similarly unrealistic about Central Europe — even when the films move into the present day with “Son of Frankenstein” the European villages look like something out of the 1800s.
WbN is one of those books I’m happy to have in TPB (the Essentials) but I don’t have any regrets about not buying it in my teenage years.
If you read books like Jerzy Kosinski ‘s The Painted Bird, it can seem that Eastern (and even Centeral) Europe had an old fashioned quqlity in the 1940s, during WWII, It is not clear the Classic Warner Mid Cycle Horor films are really contemnporary, we are not bombing The House of Frankenstein or the House of Dracula in 1943 when Ghost of Frankenstein came out,
I think it is set in 1900 oe 1910 or so . . . .
A Merry Christmas to you, Alan, and to all your readers and commenters who celebrate. Your blog brings me a lot of enjoyment and I appreciate the gifts you bring us so often!