Dracula died in the last issue of the Tomb of Dracula series. He’s revived in the first issue of Tomb of Dracula Magazine, which came out about a month later.
True, the resurrection is scripted by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Gene Colan–the two men who made the ToD series so great–but it’s so soon. It detracts from the impact of that final issue.
And now Drac gets to star in a Magazine-format book, complete with articles about movie lore.
Are the comic stories in the magazine bad? No. But we’ve been here before, so they feel a little flat.
The one in issue #2 is drawn by Steve Ditko, who really is not geared for horror.
Then with issue #4, Marv leaves. A few other creators do a few more short stories about Drac. Issue #5 reunites Dracula with Lilith, who can dress extra-sexy because it’s a magazine and not a comic.
It’s nothing bad, but it’s cancelled after #6. There really isn’t much left to say about Dracula after his death in his own book.
Here’s the last panel:
Back in the late Seventies, when Marvel’s magnificent “Tomb of Dracula” series was winding down, all of the company’s other horror-titles had bitten the dust, and the fad of the “Marvel Horror Experiment” was over. A large part of the reason why was because, for reasons that are just too simply arcane to understand forty-five years later, the year-number “1980” just sounded futuristic as Hell, and, with the rise of Science-Fiction movies like ‘Star Wars’, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, ‘Star Trek-The Motion Picture’, and ‘Battlestar Galactica’, etc., the Marvel Horror Phase just seemed……….dated. The observation above that bringing Dracula back to life so soon after his appropriately end-of-decade demise is also accurate. Harker and Company dynamited the shit out of Castle Dracula at the conclusion of the final issue, ( #70 ) so these new fools resurrecting him in this new first magazine should not have been even able to find a scrap of Drac’s clothing, let alone a complete skeleton!! It’s just farcical! What’s also farcical is assigning Steve Ditko to draw a Dracula story! Ditko’s milieu was Science-Fiction, not horror. It makes about as much sense as assigning Gene Colan to draw Spider-Man! ( wait! that’s actually been done! See ‘Captain America & The Falcon’#137-138 ) If Marvel really wanted to make Dracula work- and sellable- to a more sophisticated early 1980’s audience, they should have taken advantage of the ‘No Comics-Code’ format to expound on the ‘Dracula-Lilith’ relationship hinted at by the panel above where Little Miss Dracula tries to, uh, “vamp” Dad! THAT would have moved this series past six issues, for sure!! Oh, well, every fad belongs to it’s time, I guess, and Marvel has nothing to be ashamed about with their legendary seventy-issue run of ‘The Tomb of Dracula’! It is one of the fondest memories of my youth! Word up!