Tomb of Dracula is one of my favorite comics of the 70s. Newsstand distribution being what it was back then, I wasn’t able to get my hands on many issues as a kid, but every one I did manage to find was like a little treasure. A little treasure filled with blood and evil, but hey. That’s how I’ve always rolled.
At any rate. I’ve picked up odd issues of Tomb my whole life, mostly ragged-out copies I stumbled across in dollar boxes. They’re always a hoot, but I’ve never made a concerted effort to collect the series. In bulk, I was afraid, it might lose some of the weird charm it held when reading random issues spread out across the run: Here’s Blade! Here’s a robot with a human brain! Here’s a vampire baby! Here’s that Woody Allen character! None of these issues ever quite made sense to me taken individually, but I loved the macabre chaos of it all. If I had the through line, I thought, if I understood the plotlines, they might cease to be happy nonsense and be revealed as the same sort of shabby crap most 70s comics were.
But I sold off all my old, decaying, headache-inducing copies of Tomb as part of my recent funnybook purge, so when Marvel released the first volume of a new series of color reprints… I decided to take the plunge. Damn the torpedoes, and all that. It was interesting, and somewhat surprising, reading. My memory of the book is that it’s not very good until writer Marv Wolfman comes on in the second year and gets his longer storylines running, at which point it took off and became the batshit masterpiece I remember. I still think that’s the case, mostly, but I was shocked to discover that Wolfman actually came onto the book with issue 7, and that it took a decided downturn in quality when he did.
