In an old World War Two story, Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos find themselves allied with Count Dracula, who is eating Nazis.
Dum Dum has a “hey Kool Aid” moment when he busts through a hollow wall and finds Dracula’s tomb.
And there’s a subtle reference to Gabriel’s horn.
Nice. And unusual to have such an interesting story in this series. This is actually really fun. I would have loved for it to have gone even longer than three 8-page stories.
I can’t find a picture of him anywhere, but Doug Murray was the guy behind The ‘Nam, a truly groundbreaking and often brilliant realistic war comic book series.
This rather weird but interesting story came about when some writers up at Marvel were undoubtedly spitballing ideas one day in 1990, and came up with the idea of “Who would be the most unlikeliest Marvel characters to ever encounter each other?” and the obvious answer was, of course, Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandoes and Dracula! Weird, but, as we saw, not totally implausible! We know from having read the ‘Dracula Lives!’ magazines in 1973 that Count Dracula was quite active across Central Europe during World War II, so, having him encounter Sgt. Fury and the Howlers during that era was not impossible! ( just unlikely as Hell ) The nice touches were how Percy was totally up on Dracula to the point of apparently being familiar with Abraham Van Helsing, Reb not wasting any time with disbelief in getting to work on those wooden stakes and crosses, and Dino also being up on vampires in general and Dracula in particular, simply due to him being a Hollywood contract player prior to his being drafted into the Army. ( he MUST have been drafted- I honestly cannot see any successful actor willingly giving up on his career to go into the Military, and to war, for a measly hundred bucks a week- military scale for enlisted/drafted personnel at the time- no matter HOW patriotic he might be ) Dracula comes off in this story as being too affable to suit me- he IS, after all, the most successful mass murderer in history. That’s GOT to come with a little mean. He showed a little to Percy at the end of the story, but that was IT. Not that it makes any real difference one way or the other, but I would have preferred it anyway if this story had been set late in the war, as opposed to the early end of it, as we saw. ( July 1942 ) Running into Count Dracula just as the Howlers were ragged and exhausted from years of warfare would have made better sense from a dramatic perspective. Nevertheless, a very interesting and offbeat Marvel story. I give it an “A”!