Tomb of Dracula

Ghost Rider #19 (August, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

At the end of last Saturday’s Tomb of Dracula #47 post, I promised you that the next installment of this blog would feature “the strange, sad story of Ghost Rider #19.”  But, as anyone out there who already knows some version of this tale is well aware, its origins go back well before the May, 1976 publication of the comic whose Gil Kane-Frank Giacoia cover appears at the top of this post.  To begin with, this specific issue presents the conclusion of a multi-part storyline that had kicked off in Ghost Rider #17; but beyond that, the ongoing plot lines that find their (more or less) ultimate resolution in this arc extend back at least to Ghost Rider #8 (Oct., 1974)… and, arguably, all the way back to the feature’s debut in Marvel Spotlight #5 (Aug., 1972).  And seeing as how we haven’t discussed any issues of this series since July, 2023, when we hit the high points of Ghost Rider #1 and #2 in the context of covering the debut of spinoff character Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, in Marvel Spotlight #12 (Oct., 1973), we’re going to have to do some catching up to properly set the stage.  So let’s get to it, shall we?  Read More

Tomb of Dracula #45 (June, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Before we dive into the individual comic book that’s the main topic of today’s post, your humble blogger would like to call your attention to a more general aspect of comics history, one that’s making its debut on this site with the Gene Colan-Tom Palmer cover shown above.  Yes, it’s the Uniform Product Code — which, as best as I can tell, actually first started appearing on DC Comics’ publications in February, 1976, but, as we didn’t cover any DC books last month, had to wait for March to show up here, in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of its adoption by Marvel.  I don’t really have anything else to say about the UPC, except that we’d all best get used to it (again), because it’s not going away anytime soon.  (Yeah, sure, around the turn of the next decade the big publishers will begin using a different graphic in its place on their direct-sales editions.  But the real estate consumed by that rectangular box won’t be coming back for a long, long time.)  Read More

Werewolf by Night #15 (March, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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: Read More

Tomb of Dracula #1 (April, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The Marvel Comics title that would become Tomb of Dracula appears to have been in the works for quite some time prior to its first issue reaching stands in November, 1971.  Perhaps the first inkling comics readers had of its development had come by way of a vague reference on the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page appearing in comics published that March; in the midst of a news item explaining the moves of several artists from one title to another, the following statement appeared:

By “another 50¢ mag labeled M”, the anonymous Bulletin scribe meant that Marvel was planning a companion to Savage Tales, a black-and-white comics magazine intended “for the mature reader” whose first issue had gone on sale in January.  Read More

Justice League of America #65 (September, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When last we left the non-costumed, non-codenamed, but nonetheless quite formidable supervillain T.O. Morrow — at the conclusion of the first half of 1968’s Justice League of America-Justice Society of America summer team-up extravaganza — he’d just managed to kill all the current members of Earth-Two’s JSA (some of them for the second time that issue), and was preparing to head back to his home world of Earth-One to similarly wipe out the JLA — secure in the knowledge provided by his future-predicting computer that the only way he could be stopped was if the Red Tornado intervened; and since the Red Tornado was 1) his own android creation, and 2) also dead, he was sitting in clover, as the saying goes.  Read More