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| TOMB OF DRACULA No. 8, May 1973 |
Whilst Marv Wolfman’s second script for “Tomb Of Dracula”
is undeniably a thrilling action-packed read, crammed full of the Count’s
frightful machinations for world domination, as well as more of the living dead
than even Rachel van Helsing can shake a sharpened stake at, “The
Hell-Crawlers” also disappointingly relies upon its readers to take an awful lot
of the Shazam Award-winner’s plot devices at face value. For not only does the
Brooklyn-born writer conjure up an unnamed “quick-acting poison” which swiftly
threatens to slice through Dracula’s “vital organs” and forever contaminate
him. But he also creates the character of a physician vampire who has both somehow
managed to sire a human daughter and create “an instrument of the damned”
imaginatively called “The Projector!”
Indeed it is rather hard to imagine a less convincing
narrative in a Bronze Age comic book, especially when Doctor Heinrich Mortte’s invention looks exactly like a genuine household "opto-mechanical device
for displaying film" and yet is apparently somehow capable of “raising from the grave an
army of living vampires” all under the Count’s control. Certainly Bram Stoker’s
villainous fiend has never looked more ludicrous than when he raises the film
projector aloft above his head and excitedly exclaims “Now I have the power to
create an army of undefeatable vampires… Ha! Ha! Ha”. Little wonder that the
aristocrat’s bearded subject “rue[s] the day I first conceived this horror...”
Equally as hard to accept within this twenty-page
periodical is Wolfman’s unbelievably idiotic portrayal of Dracula and the
Transylvanian nobleman’s foolish treatment of the ‘teacher of medicine’. The
creator of Blade quickly establishes, through the blood-drinker’s physical
abuse of the “insufferable” Clifton Graves, that his version of the Lord of
Vampires is highly intolerant of his servants. But having pushed Mortte to his
moral threshold's breaking point by contemptuously belittling the scientist whilst he takes the
Projector from him, the sneering 'immortal' then incomprehensibly tells Heinrich
that the doctor’s “daughter must be our first victim… to show the world we
vampires hold no quarter for anyone!” It is therefore little wonder that upon
hearing this the elderly consultant steals back the instrument he “should have
destroyed… years ago” and shatters it upon “the ice-capped ground” in his
death-throes.
Fortunately Issue Eight of “Tomb Of Dracula” still proves
to be an entertaining experience as a result of Gene Colan’s exemplary
pencilling and Ernie [Chua] Chan’s inks. In fact the artistic duo really seem
to have been at their best whilst producing this comic strip, especially
towards the book’s end as Dracula and Mortte lock fangs in the guise of giant
flying bats, and Quincy escapes certain death at the tiny hands of a horde of
hypnotised youths.
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| Writer: Marv Wolfman, Artist: Gene Colan, and Inker: Ernie Chan |
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