In March, 1974, Marvel Comics’ black-and-white magazine Dracula Lives entered its second year of publication with a format relatively little changed from its first issue — meaning that it featured three all-new stories of the titular vampire (one set in the present, two set in the past), supplemented by illustrated text features and a reprint or two, all packaged behind a color painted cover.  (In this case, the cover was provided by Luis Dominguez, an Argentinian artist who’d been busy of late drawing covers [and occasional stories] for various DC Comics anthology titles; this was his third published cover for a Marvel horror magazine.) 

Leading off issue #6 was a contemporary tale of Dracula written by Steve Gerber and illustrated by Gene Colan and Ernie Chan; like virtually all such Dracula Lives tales, it doesn’t attempt to integrate itself into the continuity of its companion title, the monthly color Tomb of Dracula comic — although it does indirectly reference events in that series, as we’ll see anon…

Readers of the recent crossover between Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night would recall that that storyline had alluded to a spell that could destroy all vampires; there, however, the spell was contained in a diary previously belonging to Baron Gregory Russoff (the late father of werewolf Jack Russell) — a diary also known as the “Second Book of Sins”, and established as being distinct from the first Book of Sins, the Darkhold.

On the face of it, one might not expect Chan’s scratchily detailed inking style to be a good fit for Colan’s expressionistic pencils — but in this story, at least, the combination makes for some very attractive artwork.

Dracula continues to fume impotently until an unexpected opportunity for him to “breach the walls of that overgrown country church” presents itself in the form of two priestly pedestrians.  “For a moment, Dracula hesitates, contemplating what the awful consequences of his daring inspiration could be — should it fail.”

The narrative captions (and footnote) in the third from last panel above make it unambiguously clear that the anti-vampire spell Dracula is currently hunting down is indeed the very same one that figured into the Tomb of Dracula/Werewolf by Night crossover.

Montesi’s statement that the Darkhold “no longer exists” is in line with what readers have been told in recent issues of Werewolf by Night — namely, that the tome was destroyed at the end of the third issue of that title  — although no such destruction actually took place therein (at least, not in view of us readers).

Running through the Vatican’s corridors, Drac is of course greeted by crosses and crucifixes at every turn.  He comes to realize that this entire venture has been a mad folly on his part…

“Days ago… I mailed… copy of incantation… to Harker — !”  That would of course be Quincy Harker, the dean of vampire hunters in the Marvel Universe, and a prominent member of Tomb of Dracula‘s supporting cast.  Which means you might well expect the “Montesi Formula” (as the spell would soon come to be called) to turn up in the color comic’s continuity, sooner or later — as indeed it would, albeit in the third issue of the spinoff title Giant-Size Dracula rather than in ToD itself.  In that comic, published in September, 1974, Quincy would be kidnapped by a woman seeking the spell, but would deny having it, even under intense interrogation.  Was he telling the truth?  It’s hard to imagine that if he did have the formula, he wouldn’t eventually use it, but there’s no evidence that he ever did — which suggests that Montesi’s mailed copy was either intercepted or lost.  Half a century later, it’s all still something of a mystery.  (Naturally, other copies of the Montesi Formula, as well as of the Darkhold, would continue to figure into Marvel Comics stories for decades to come.)

Next up in Dracula Lives #6 is a photo-illustrated text feature by Doug Moench concerning the historical Dracula, entitled “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Real Dracula (Undead and Well in Wallachia)”.  That’s followed by the issue’s one and only reprint — a 1954 tale from the 22nd issue of Marvel’s pre-Comics Code horror comic Spellbound.  Drawn by Mac L. Pakula, “The Mark of a Vampire!” is a pretty forgettable effort — but at only four pages, it doesn’t hang around long enough to wear out its welcome, and along the way does at least deliver a memorable image or two (such as the example shown at left).

This yarn is followed by the first installment in a text story of Dracula in the present day; written by Thompson O’Rourke (a name otherwise completely unfamiliar to your humble blogger) and illustrated by Ernie Chan, this chapter of “Blood Moon” runs for six pages, and will conclude in the next issue.  It’s succeeded by the second new Dracula comics story — a tale written by Tony Isabella and illustrated by John Buscema and Pablo Marcos, called “Shadow Over Versailles”.  Set in Revolutionary-era France, this one is actually a direct sequel to a story that had appeared in the previous issue of Dracula Lives; as such, it behooves us to review the events of that earlier tale, if only briefly.

Dracula Lives #5’s “A Duel of Demons”, written by Gerry Conway and drawn by Frank Springer, told how Count Dracula, having temporarily abandoned his homeland of Transylvania due to turmoil there, came to the court of King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, to ask for a place there as a royal advisor.  This development was displeasing to another of the royal advisors, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro — a real-life occultist whom previous issues of Dracula Lives had established as a long-time foe of Drac, though he’d never been seen on-panel before this — who believed the new arrival meant to displace him.  Events progressed apace until climaxing in a duel between vampire and sorcerer — a battle which ended when Dracula sank his fangs into the throat of his opponent’s wife, killing her and, ultimately, cursing her with vampirism.

Such remains the state of affairs as DL #6’s “Shadow Over Versailles” begins…

Buscema and Marcos make for a great team here, with the latter’s expert use of screentone adding loads of atmospheric texture to the former’s reliably fine draftsmanship.

Cagliostro’s last thought bubble above, with its cryptic “there is still Dubois!” remark, seems on the face of it to be laying groundwork for a future episode — but, in fact, the tale of the sculptor Jacques Dubois’ attempt to destroy Dracula on Cagliostro’s behalf has already been told, via flashback, in Dracula Lives #3’s “Shadow in the City of Light!”.  As it happens, this scene is the last we’ll see of Count Cagliostro in the pages of this title — though, as you might imagine, it’s hardly the last time he’ll show up in a Marvel comic.

As regards Cagliostro’s newly introduced confederate, Montplier — as best as I can determine, this character has no real-world historical basis, although his name clearly evokes that of the French city of Montpellier.  (Wikipedia tells us that there were in fact Lords of Montpellier in medieval times, but their line ceased in the 14th century; still, one may suppose that things could have gone differently on Earth-616.)

As Dracula morphs from bat to human form, the captions explain that he’s attempted to be cautious since arriving in France, not wanting to draw attention by feasting on his fellow aristocrats, while also not wanting to spook the common rabble by chowing down on them so avidly that they’ll stop coming out at night.  “Still, even the cautious make mistakes…”

The villagers manage to beat Dracula into unconsciousness with their wooden crosses; when the Count regains awareness, he’s in a dungeon, chained between two more sturdy crosses, with a necklace of garlic balls hung around his neck.  And he’s not alone; his jailer has been waiting patiently for him to awake…

In most of the vampire stories I’ve read (or viewed), beheading usually occurs after a stake has already been driven into the bloodsucker’s heart.  On the other hand, I’ve never read a story where a headless vampire staggers around trying to find his absent noggin, so Montplier may very well be on to something here.

Montplier had been correct earlier in referring to the Bastille as “little-used”; according to Wikipedia, there were only seven prisoners being held there at the time of its famous Storming.  (Dracula’s presence would presumably raise that number to eight.)

Louis and Marie would manage to hold out for another few years; but, of course, they both eventually followed Lord Montplier to the guillotine.  (At least, I assume that’s what happened on Earth-616, but who really knows?)

Following the conclusion of “Shadow Over Versailles”, we have one more photo-illustrated text feature — a review by Tony Isabella of the 1968 film Dracula Has Risen from the Grave — and then it’s on to the issue’s third and final new comics story.  Per the magazine’s regular format, it is, unsurprisingly, another past-set tale; but it’s also considerably more than that, being the second chapter of writer Roy Thomas and artist Dick Giordano’s adaptation of the prose work without which this title wouldn’t even exist in the first place:  Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula.

In the context of Marvel Comics circa 1974, a Dracula adaptation was, if not necessarily a no-brainer, still a fairly obvious project to pursue.  Thomas, who was Marvel’s editor-in-chief at the time, was highly motivated towards adapting genre fiction to comics, with Conan the Barbarian being the most obvious (and probably most successful) example of his own efforts as a writer in that area.  Marvel had even recently published comics adaptations of three classic horror novels: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Marvel’s version of which comprised the first three issues of their color Frankenstein comic; and H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which ran in the second and fourth issues, respectively, of another color title, Supernatural Thrillers.

But Thomas had something more ambitious in mind for Dracula.  He realized that by serializing a comics version in Dracula Lives, with no individual chapter running more than 10 or 12 pages, Marvel could give Stoker’s novel the most faithful and complete treatment possible, letting it run for as long as necessary.  What was more, Thomas wanted to produce the serial in such a way so that it could be easily collected as a single coherent work later on — despite the fact that no one in America was then publishing what we would now call “graphic novels”, or “trade collections”.

For an artistic collaborator, Thomas turned to the veteran illustrator Dick Giordano.  While Giordano was still doing most of his freelance comics work for DC, he’d been picking up more inking assignments from Marvel as of late (though this would be his first pencilling job for the publisher since he’d worked on their romance comics in the late 1950s and early 1960s).  Giordano shared Thomas’ enthusiasm for Stoker’s novel, and, in the writer/editor’s own words (as recorded in his 2004 afterword to Stoker’s Dracula #1): “He had the kind of illustrative approach I thought perfect for the adaptation, and was someone I could depend on to do his dead-level best to deliver the material we needed every two months.”

Regarding the ongoing working process of producing the adaptation, Thomas describes how he and Giordano worked from the same paperback edition of the novel, allowing Thomas to make direct reference to specific page numbers in the plot synopses he prepared for each individual installment.  After typing out his synopsis he’d send it to Giordano, “and he delivered beautiful rough pencils, which I then scripted.  I commandeered as letterer the inestimable Joe Rosen, because he could letter smaller than any man alive, and could thus squeeze in the most copy and still leave room for the art…  Then Dick would be sent the lettered pencils, so that he could ink them and add the grey ‘wash’ that would help give the story its somber mood.”

The first episode of Thomas and Giordano’s Dracula serial appeared in Dracula Lives #5 (Mar., 1974); running for twelve pages, it adapted Stoker’s novel through the first chapter and a little bit beyond.  That material is recapped in Dracula Lives #6, appearing as the first two pages of the serial’s second installment:

The decision to “reprint” panels from the previous chapter(s) at the beginning of each new one was one made in service of the imagined single-volume collection which Thomas and Giordano both hoped would serve as the material’s ultimate presentation.  As Thomas explains in his Stoker’s Dracula #1 afterword:

…we didn’t want any captions in the actual chapters to have to recap preceding ones, because that would be awkward if (when!) the adaptation was reprinted.  So… we arranged that, starting with chapter two, Dick would do a paste-up of a couple of pages of photostats of art from the preceding chapter, for which I would write partly new captions.  When these “drop-pages” were omitted, the story would flow smoothly from one chapter into another, with no summarizing.  Those introductions appeared at the start of each Dracula chapter except the first…

These recaps would, of necessity, become ever less detailed as the adaptation progressed; otherwise, they’d have eventually left no room for new material.  Here, the first installment is effectively summarized in two pages, allowing our storytellers ten pages to advance the narrative…

As in Stoker’s novel, Count Dracula himself shows Jonathan Harker to his rooms, inviting him to take supper as soon as he’s refreshed himself…

The episode of the “blue flame” seems to have been suggested to Bram Stoker by an article he’d read about Transylvanian superstitions; of course, the fact that the “coachman” who’s brought Harker to Castle Dracula is eventually revealed to be none other than the Count himself means that the explanation offered here isn’t quite complete.  Does Dracula help maintain his standard of (un)living by seeking out random local treasure hoards every St. George’s Eve?  Or is he just checking to make sure that loot he himself stashed away long ago is still secure?  To the best of my knowledge, Stoker never gives any further explanation for this episode; it’s just a bit of spooky business that uses a piece of presumably authentic folklore to enhance the novel’s eerie atmosphere, while having no real impact on the overall plot.  By including it, however, Thomas and Giordano are giving us a strong indication of just how faithful they intend their adaptation to be.

Dracula’s historical monologue — which comes along one chapter later in Stoker’s novel than in this version, and is substantially longer — isn’t quite so specifically focused on the voivode Vlad Tepes (i.e., Dracula himself, at least in the Marvel Universe) in its original form as it is here.  Still, one can hardly fault Thomas and Giordano for wanting to tie the Count’s speech in more thoroughly with the origin story presented by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Neal Adams in Dracula Lives #2 — an association that’s only enhanced by Giordano’s directly lifting several images from that story to use in the historical montage panel shown above.  (Not that Adams — Giordano’s friend, business partner, and frequent collaborator — is likely to have objected.)

Giordano’s use of gray wash in this story is just as effective as Pablo Marco’s use of screentone earlier in the issue, if not more so; they’re both great examples of how to make the most of the black-and-white comics format, in my view.

Jonathan Harker’s next diary entry, a brief one, tells us how he’s come to take comfort in a crucifix he was given by an innkeeper’s wife in the previous episode.  Then, moving on to the next entry…

So ends the second chapter of Thomas and Giordano’s adaptation of Dracula, at an exceptionally dramatic moment which — if you’re curious — occurs a little more than halfway through the third chapter of the novel.

Five more installments would appear through 1975, running in Dracula Lives #7, 8, 10, 11, and (following the cancellation of DL with issue #13) in Legion of Monsters #1, making for a total of 76 (non-recap) pages of comics.  And then, with eighteen of Stoker’s twenty-eight chapters left to adapt, the project was abandoned — left orphaned by the demise of Marvel’s black-and-white horror line.

Thomas and Giordano attempted to revive the project on more than one occasion over the next several decades, whether at Marvel or elsewhere, but without success.  So they were taken by surprise when, in early 2004, a Marvel editor named Mark Beazley (who hadn’t even been born when the last chapter of the adaptation was published) contacted them to ask if they’d be interested in completing their unfinished symphony.  They were, of course; and so, over a six-month period beginning in October, 2004, Marvel Comics published four issues of Stoker’s Dracula, reprinting the original material from the ’70s as well as the all-new conclusion — a publishing initiative that culminated in the single-volume edition Thomas and Giordano had always envisioned, released just in time for Halloween in 2005.

Naturally, the finished work that Marvel published in the early 21st century was not the same Thomas-Giordano Dracula that we would have seen had the creators been able to complete their work as originally planned, in the mid-Seventies.  For one thing, Marvel set a specific page limit for the project of 176 pages, requiring some compression of the narrative’s remaining chapters; for another, neither Thomas nor Giordano were the same creator they had been three decades earlier.  Even so, it’s a remarkable piece of work — one likely to stand as the definitive comics adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for many years to come.  And one that we can be grateful was brought to fruition when it was, given that one of its creators was fated to leave us just half a decade later, in 2010.  Sadly, Dick Giordano is gone; but Dracula lives.