Salome is back. And Blade thinks Band-Aids should be sold for black skin.
He’s right about that.
He gets a call from Bible John, whose house is impressive.
John tells him that something wicked is happening, and they go to investigate–because this version of Blade doesn’t just kill vampires. He’s like Punisher for street-level occult threats.
Salome uses Marie Laveau to capture Blade and we learn that Varnae is not dead. He just lost his body. And guess whose body they want to transfer him to?
So Blade spends quite a bit of time strung up on a wall in this story. Until he escapes and they manage to shift the spell to one of Aaron Thorne’s henchmen (a rastafarian named “Steppin’ Razor”).
Bible John needs medical care, and when Blade takes Bible John home from the hospital, they are immediately attacked by Marie Laveau’s vampire cult. As he struggles with how to save his friend, Blade is attacked by…Blade. A future version of himself, called Crossbow, comes back in time to prevent Blade from doing something that screws up the future.
Sigh.
Alternate timelines and “future timeline” characters are already ruining the X-Men, so why not include them here?
And of course Dracula is still running around. None of this gets resolved, and future Blade just skulks away.
It’s pretty obvious that this was intended by the writers as the beginning of the next arc, not the end of the series. In fact, the covers to the next two issues (which were never produced) are included at the end of the issue.
And speaking of credits, they do have fun with them for issue #8…
