Back in March we took a look at Tomb of Dracula #45, which in addition to chronicling the first face-to-face meeting between Blade, the Vampire Slayer, and Hannibal King, the Vampire Detective (and their subsequent decision to team up against their common enemy Deacon Frost) also served as the kickoff for a major new story arc, as our titular star became acquainted with a congregation of Satan worshipers and got the brilliant idea not just to pose as their infernal Dark Lord, but to take one of their number, the lovely and mysterious Domini, in unholy matrimony.
One thing you’ve got to say about ol’ Vlad — once he gets the notion of tying the knot, he doesn’t waste any time. As heralded by Gene Colan and Tom Palmer’s cover for ToD #46, the very next issue provided us with “The Marriage of Dracula!” Talk about your brief engagements, amirite? But despite what that same cover implied — that Drac and Dom’s nuptials were destined to be disrupted by a blank-visaged intruder called “the Faceless Fiend” — said ceremony would in fact come off without so much as a single hitch, as depicted in the opening pages of the story crafted by Colan, Palmer, and writer Marv Wolfman:
As regular readers will recall, in issue #45 Dracula had tried to remove this painting of Jesus from the deconsecrated church in which he and his new flock of followers have set up shop — and had failed. That had given us readers a strong hint that this particular visual representation of Christianity’s central figure was much more than a mere work of art — an impression pretty well clinched here by the revelation that the painted face of Christ is evidently capable of shedding real tears (not that anyone seems to notice).
At this point the story departs from Dracula and company to set up the other major plotline of this issue, which involves a murdered employee of an industrial company who returns from the dead to take gruesome revenge on his employers. Said bosses kill this poor schmuck when he threatens to expose their illegal pollution practices, then toss his body into a pipeline full of acid wastes which strips him of his facial features — yep, he’s the Faceless Fiend promised by the book’s cover. It’s a good little “just deserts” horror yarn in the grand EC Comics tradition — Colan and Palmer’s depiction of the revenant’s gruesome progress as he “replaces” his stolen features one by one at the expense of his hapless victims (an eye here, an ear there, and so son) is quite effective — but it involves Dracula only incidentally, and its interpolation into a story chronicling what should be a major event in the overall Tomb of Dracula saga feels awkward, at least to this reader, throwing the whole issue weirdly off balance
After setting up the “Faceless Fiend” business, our storytellers check in with Blade and Hannibal King just long enough to let us know that the unfortunate vamp they used as an informant in the previous installment has been dispatched off-panel by means of Blade “splitting him ear-to-ear”, in King’s phrase. Yeesh. And then, it’s back to Drac:
Dracula flies away from the church, carrying his bride off to… some secluded place that’s left unspecified by text or art. (Since there’s a coffin already on site, my guess is that it’s the deserted manse previously occupied by Dr. Sun, which Drac used briefly as home base following the latter’s defeat in ToD #42.) They chat for a couple of panels, until the Count decides he needs solitude to contemplate the meaning of the love he’s unexpectedly found himself feeling for Domini. So he flies away again, leaving her alone on her wedding night. Some honeymoon, huh?
Drac is also feeling a bit peckish, which is how he finally gets involved with the Faceless Fiend; a woman he randomly selects to be his dinner is by sheer coincidence one of the Fiend’s murderers, and so the Lord of the Vampires gets caught in the middle of things when he finds he has competition for his prey. But Dracula’s participation in the action is ultimately inconsequential; the Fiend completes his vengeance despite the vampire’s interference, slaying all his slayers and reconstructing his face (sort of)… only to find it’s all meaningless:
Anybody want to bet that poor, hungry Dracula doesn’t manage to grab a quick bite before winging his way back to Domini? I didn’t think so.
Anyway, this brings us at last to the main topic of today’s post — i.e., Tomb of Dracula #47, which behind another moody cover by Colan and Palmer finds them and Wolfman continuing their ongoing tale:
“Perhaps,” Dracula replies. “But it is hard for me to think in those terms, Domini. I have existed so very long, been so many people in so many lands –” He proceeds to reflect aloud upon his beginnings, when he was the mortal monarch Vlad the Impaler, prior to his being made a vampire: “A soldier I was… and once I sought to dominate this world by force. Now I seek to dominate through thought.
“But in the end… I still seek domination. That is all a warrior ever desires.”
Blade, King, and Saffron head for the apartment Blade has rented for them in Cambridge; once they get there, however, Blade tells his grumpy ally to make himself scarce for an hour or so: “Go rob a blood bank or something, huh?” Say no more, nudge nudge, wink wink.
The scene then shifts to Beacon Hill, and to the series’ alleged comic relief characters, Harold H. Harold and Aurora Rabinowitz, who are about to have their first official date:
From there, it’s on to Boston Common, where we find a somewhat more serious couple, Rachel van Helsing and Frank Drake, having a decidedly more serious talk. Or, rather, Rachel is trying to talk to Frank about the super-macho way he’s been behaving lately. Frank, however, isn’t hearing it — in fact, he accuses Rachel of being “jealous of the man I’ve become.” Or maybe she’s “frightened“, seeing as how he’s “a heckuva lot stronger” than he used to be. “From where I sit, Rachel — you’re the one with problems — not me.”
And that’s all the time and space we have for subplots and supporting characters this issue, as we now head back to the Church of Dracula…
“To be one with you in the way of man and wife…” Um, is that even possible? Can Count Dracula, a vampire, engage in the act of sexual intercourse? Up until this point, Marvel’s various chroniclers of Dracula’s exploits over the centuries (as had been featured in the now-defunct Dracula Lives and Giant-Size Dracula titles as well as in ToD) had managed to keep the answer to that question ambiguous.
Okay, so… no physical hanky-panky. Got it. Even so, whatever mystical “union” is taking place here evidently requires both Dracula and Domini getting naked (well, Dracula isn’t completely nude, but he does appear to be unclothed where it, um, counts, if you know what I mean). That, and the fact that our storytellers make it perfectly clear that Jesus is watching while all this is going on make me a little surprised that this page got through the Comics Code Authority.
Dracula turns to mist before the murderous intruder fires his weapon in his direction, but swiftly returns to his corporeal human form to take care of business — first carelessly knocking the man’s gun aside, then seizing him when he tries to flee…
The final page of this story, quiet as it is, is one of my favorites in the entire run of Tomb of Dracula. Colan and Palmer do a masterful job of communicating emotional content through their characters’ body language and facial expressions, despite the minimal changes in both from one panel to the next. And Wolfman’s text, which explicitly tells us what Domini understands (and what Dracula is entirely oblivious to) regarding the events they’ve just experienced, provides a perfect counterpoint to the images.
Of course, back in May, 1976 that text resonated for me personally in a way it no longer can; as I’ve written about many times before, I was raised a devout Southern Baptist, and when I first read this story I was still a firm believer in the divinity of Jesus Christ and in the saving grace of his forgiveness. Fifty years later, that’s no longer the case; but while I obviously can no longer nod my head in approval at the writer’s doctrinal acumen while reading this scene (for the record, I don’t know if I was aware in 1976 that Marv Wolfman is in fact Jewish; probably not), I still find it to be a powerful and moving piece of storytelling.
To my mind, this sequence also serves — as indeed does the whole “Church/Bride/Son of Dracula” saga that’s now underway — as a sterling example of how to use unambiguously religious themes in a mainstream comic-book story in a subtle and respectful way that neither debases nor exalts the belief system of any one set of readers over or against that of another. The fact that this was all orchestrated by Marv Wolfman — who in addition to being the writer/editor of Tomb of Dracula was at this particular time the editor-in-chief of Marvel’s entire color line — makes it exceedingly puzzling how things went so wrong in another Christ-featuring storyline going on at the very same time over in another Marvel comic — one that spectacularly crashed and burned in the very same month that ToD #47 came out. But that’s a topic for another post… our very next one, as a matter of fact. So please, stay tuned for the strange, sad story of Ghost Rider #19, coming your way next Saturday.