Dr. Strange’s manservant Wong has been bitten by Dracula, so Dr. Strange turns his attention to the king of vampires. Some are probably wondering why it had to get personal before Strange attacked bloodsuckers, but it makes sense to me: Doctor Strange’s mission is to protect Earth from extradimensional encroachment–he’s not intended to proactively go after domestic threats.
At the end of the issue, Dracula kills Strange.
But of course he didn’t really. Strange projected his astral self out of this body, so now he’s floating around–but he can’t go back into his body without succumbing to Dracula’s curse and becoming a vampire.
Then at the end of the Dr. Strange issue, Strange kills Dracula.
I’m sure Steve and Marv had fun killing each others’ titular characters!
But no, of course Drac isn’t dead. We learn next issue that Dracula simply turned into mist to avoid being killed.
A really fun crossover, and I love how the main character dies at the end of both issues. So much fun!
In the Tomb issue, we also see Hannibal and Blade meet for the first time.
The legendary crossover/historic-and nearly fatal-first confrontation of Dr. Strange and Count Dracula, from Dr. Strange#44, and The Tomb of Dracula#14- ( “The Tomb of Dr. Strange”- is one of my all-time favorite Marvel adventures. It was written with a great deal of care and foresight, possibly because the writers understood how important this most significant first showdown between a major Marvel Super-Hero and the Lord of the Undead needed to be. Dracula’s “non-encounter” with Spider-Man two years earlier in Giant-Size Spider-Man#1 ( 1974 ) doesn’t count ( “count”-see what I did with that-?? heh-heh-heh! ) because they didn’t actually encounter each other, except for that one inexplicable scene on the promenade where the Count, and Spidey, in his Parker-mode, crash into each other after rounding a corner- and Spidey’s Spidey-sense is not the least-bit alarmed at having just crashed into the greatest mass-murderer in all of history!!! Yeah, Giant-Size Spider-Man#1 was a cheat, and an all-around disappointment, one which I had very high hopes for, ever since I purchased the very first issue of ‘Tomb of Dracula’ two years prior! But the showdown between the Sorcerer Supreme and the Lord of the Undead was infinitely more satisfying! No more coyness or ambiguity over whether vampires,werewolves, and zombies, etc., exist in the mainstream Marvel Universe ( Earth-616 ) with Spider-Man, the FF, Thor, Iron Man, Silver Surfer, et.al- they DO, it’s GOOD, and it’s going to provide a great wealth of epic confrontation between the ultimate do-gooders ( superheroes ) and the ultimate do-badders ( vampires ) beginning with “The Tomb of Dr.Strange”! I fall into that percentage of Marvel cognoscenti who cannot understand why Dr. Strange had to be personally affected by a vampire attack before he would make some kind of attempt at proaction- does the world need to completely fall to a total vampire apocalypse before Doc Strange gets his head out and realizes that with great power comes great responsibility-??? That Marvel vampire apocalypse we witnessed in ‘What If’#32 was positively chilling-NOT what we need!! Writers Marv Wolfman ( could there BE a more appropriate writer-surname for this story??? ) and Steve Englehart exercise positively exhaustive understanding of the most minute aspects of vampire powers, as Dr. Strange and Count Dracula pull out all the stops to destroy each other! I can only hope and pray that if anything as shitty as what happens to Dr.Strange in this story ever happens to me, I will be able to cope with it, and deal with it with the same levels of lucidity and stoicism as Doc handled this crisis! His attitude, upon his first awakening as a vampire following the requisite three days and nights of incubation, seems to be, “Well, shit- isn’t THIS a fine mess??!” The final climax to their battle, wherein Doc finally realizes that the ONLY deity who is going to be able to pull his magical fat out the fire THIS time, is the ULTIMATE deity- “Oh, Jehovah, the great Tetragrammaton…..” and then follows with a pretty impressive recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, for a guy who’s spent his entire adult life studying pagan deities, which results in Drac bursting into flames like Johnny Storm! No matter how many times I reread this sequence, and over the past forty-six years, I’ve lost count, ( see?? I did it again!! ) I get goosebumps!! It is quite possibly the most powerful and dramatic sequence ever published in a comic-book, and I do not say that lightly! Dracula’s escape from destruction here is borderline puerile, but, as noted above, it DOES reflect the author’s exhaustive understanding of a vampire’s supernatural abilities- especially one as heavily practiced as Count Dracula! I would have guessed that Doc’s own supernatural powers, not the least of which being the Eye of Agamotto, would have tipped him to the Count’s little backdoor-stunt! I guess not! In the final panel of the story, Doc remarks to the newly-restored-to-life Wong “Thank GOD, Dracula will menace Mankind nevermore!” Well, that is the ONLY time I can ever recall Doc thanking God for anything- he usually thanks some abstract pagan deity, like Agamotto, or Raggadoor, or some-such, for his good fortune- but I seem to recall on the final off-blurb of my copy of Dr.Strange#14 as reading, “Oh, well, even DOC can’t be right ALL the time- right, kids-??” as a way of prefacing the readership that Drac is, in all probability, not quite as dead as Doc and Wong would prefer to believe. But, nevertheless, all-in-all, “The Tomb of Dr.Strange” is not only a timeless Marvel Masterpiece, but, to this very day, the single most satisfying battle between Count Dracula and a Marvel Heavyweight to date! Nuff Said!!