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I wanna catch up a little bit with Dracula Lives! since it's been so criminally under-represented here, and I don't want the count sneaking into my house at night and putting the bite on me.
This Warren-esque cover is by Penalva, someone whose work I'm not terribly familiar with. But its got everything you need for a Dracula cover: Drac looking menacing, a sexy woman threatened...what else is there?
Like the debut issue, this second volume features an assortment of new work, reprint tales, and text features. We start out with "That Dracula May Live Again!", by Marv Wolfman and Neal Adams. And, as you can see by the astonishing splash page, Neal was, as they say, bringing it:
...I mean, wow. And every one of the thirteen pages is as good as this one. This story is basically the Secret Origin of Dracula, and its a compelling tale, brilliantly told.
Next is a reprint tale, drawn entirely by Joe Sinnott, called "Vampires Drink Deep!", which is goofy fun, and comes as a nice change of pace from the intensity of the opening feature.
Third is a text fiction piece written by Chris Claremont, and then is "The Terror That Stalked Castle Dracula!" by Steve Gerber, my pal Tony Isabella, and the unusual art team of Jim Starlin and Syd Shores. This is another one of those stories that exemplifies, how do you write a story with Pure Evil as your main protagonist and sort-of hero? Easy, have him take on someone worse...the Nazis!
"One Corpse...One Vote!" is another reprint tale, this time by Stan "Ok, Marvin, I'll create this superhero book and then I'm outta here" Lee and Fred Kida, which features zombies eating a politician at the end...write your own joke here.
"The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans" by Roy Thomas, Gene Colan, and Dick Giordano, is quite a sexy tale, about an old gypsy woman who becomes young and actually tried to seduce Dracula! Women were different back in the seventies.
A great, solid issue, a definite ramp up from the first--the Wolfman/Adams tale alone was worth the price. Dracula does indeed live!
It's long past due when it comes to talking about of my favorite b/w mags, Marvel's Dracula Lives! Marvel's popular Tomb of Dracula led to this spin-off mag, and they brought some of their greatest creative people to work on it.
After the cover by Boris Vallejo, the mag kicks off with "A Poison of the Blood", by the TOD team of Gerry Conway, Gene Colan, and Tom Palmer, where Drac gets messed up with a weird cult. You know you're weird when the King of the Undead looks down on you(speaking of weird, this was where Marvel would do their occasional black-and-white-plus-red printing technique, which always looked to me like it was a mistake, since it looked so odd).
"Suffer Not A Witch", by Roy Thomas, Alan Weiss, and Dick Giordano, is a tale set during the Salem Witch Trials, and like the previous story shows that Dracula wasn't always the most evil guy in the book.
"Dracula is Alive and Well and Living on Madison Avenue" is a text-piece about the new mag, something I wish modern comics did more of--talking directly to the audience, and asking them to write back. After that is "Zombie!", a reprint tale drawn by Tony DiPreta, which is about as gory as a post-Code zombie story could be...i.e., not much.
"Ghost of a Chance!" is another reprint tale, but it only goes on for two pages so it's over before you know it. Another text piece, "What Can You Say About A Five-Hundred-Year-Old Vampire Who Refuses To Die?" is by Marv Wolfman and is a nice brief history of Dracula in film.
Yet another reprint tale, "Fright!" follows...hmm, Marvel must have had a lot of inventory lying around. Luckily, the mag ends with "To Walk Again in Daylight!" by Steve Gerber, Rich Buckler, and Pablo Marcos, an original tale of Drac taking on someone who thinks he's out-thought the good Count. Turns out he's wrong.
All in all, not a bad start, even if the reprint quotient is kinda high. As we'll see as Dracula Lives! continues, Marvel would ramp up the original material, and some really fine work gets produced.
And that's it! Thanks to DC for eventually publishing this(sort of), and of course to Jack "King" Kirby!
What a kick-ass page!
I was digging through my collection of Amazing World of DC Comics prozines today and forgot about this little gem from the August, 1974 first issue--"Murder, Inc!", the first story from the unpublished second issue of Jack Kirby's In The Days of the Mob b/w magazine!
The story runs ten pages and is really a thing of beauty. I'm presenting this more as a curiosity, but if anyone would like, I'll post the rest of the story(in order) in successive posts. Lemme know!
I had planned to do a bunch of Warrens for a while, but that was until I came across this beauty in my local 7-11 while on an ice cream run. I always check out the comic selection there with the idea of picking one up, but then I saw this--Spider-Man Magazine? What?!?
Obviously this was released in conjunction with the movie, but I don't care--the Big Two need to do more stuff like this. It features a story from Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man, a story from Marvel Adventures: The Avengers, special bonus pin-ups (labeled as such!), a two-page pin-up of Spidey's villains, Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius, a page of Marvel trading cards, an Amazing Spider-Girl text story(!!), Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe pages, reprints of classic Amazing Spider-Man covers, and even a puzzles-and-games section! Excelsior!
While the cover price is a little hefty for a throwaway purchase($7!), this is a really great package of features meant to appeal to young kids in a Spider-Man frenzy. This thing harkens back to the classic multi-feature publications of the 70s, when comic companies were still trying to court younger readers. In the indicia, it just says Spider-Man Magazine, not Spider-Man Magazine #1, so maybe Marvel has no intention of doing a second issue. That's unfortunate, but maybe if this sells well they'll do more like this for the slate of Marvel movies they've got planned--c'mon, Marvel, I wanna see Fantastic Four Magazine, The Incredible Hulk Magazine, and IronMan Magazine!
I plan to buy multiple copies of this and give them out to every little comics fan I know. Maybe I can single-handedly help Marvel realize they've got a winner on their hands...
I am now only one issue--#2--away from having a complete set of Jim Warren's first publishing effort, the nudie-mag After Hours. The person selling this copy of #3 on ebay didn't have any knowledge of its historical value, though the bidders sure did, and there was quite a bidding war, but I was determined to prevail. This copy is in astonishingly good condition--it's practically mint--and I'm amazed that someone would think to keep some old nudie-mag around for so long and with such care. But I'm so glad they did!
Like the previous issue I discussed, #3 here doesn't have any sci-fi/horror/comic content, so it's notable purely for having Jim Warren's name on the masthead:
(BTW, wanna bet that "Pete Twaddle" wasn't that guy's real name?)
This issue does feature gen-u-ine nudity, but its more of the nude-art-study variety. If these photos were in any other context than this magazine--with its sniggering articles on Las Vegas and pulpy short fiction stories--they'd probably be considered classy. There's also lots of Playboy-style gag cartoons, an article on hot Italian women like Sophia Loren and Gina Lollabrigida.
And like with the first issue, there's at least one centerfold featuring a woman who, er, probably got further in the world of nude modeling than she normally would have simply because she was willing to take off her clothes back then:
...I know I'm probably ragging on somebody's Grammy now, and I know that tastes change over time..but not that much.
You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better subject for a theme issue than Neal Adams, who contributed so much great work for Warren over the years. It's sad that Warren in its final days couldn't afford to have Neal do a new cover, and used one by Richard Corben instead. Not that Corben is some slouch; but like the previous all-Toth issue that sported a Rudy Nebres cover, it hardly helps sell the contents inside.
Oh, but once you open the issue, you're treated to some of Warren's finest work, drawn by arguably the greatest comic book artist of the seventies:
"Curse of the Vampire!" written by Archie Goodwin, with Neal doing some really nice wash work
"The Terror Beyond Time!", written by Goodwin and featuring Neal's representation of evil itself!
"Goddess from the Sea" written by Don Glut and reproduced entirely by Neal's pencils.
"Thrillkill" written by Jim Stenstrum--TwoMorrows's The Warren Companion just might be right; this could be the single best story Warren ever published. Neal's execution of the way-to-true-to-real-life story makes a horrifying tale that much more real.
"A Curse of Claws!" written by Goodwin again features one of Neal's sexiest female protagonists.
"Voodoo Drum!", written by Goodwin(!!), is another all-pencil job
...and finally, "Fair Exchange", written by guess who, is famous for the way the story is told--each page uses a different sequential art technique--one page is all open panels, another is all page-size horizontial panels, one is constructed so it reads the same upside down! Neal definitely earned his page rate for this story.
An extraordinairily good issue, culled from some of Warren's finest moments. This issue is found on ebay easily for just a few bucks; any Adams fan couldn't do better than to pick this baby up!
Like I said, I was never much of a FMOF devotee growing up, but during my periodic search for a Warren Publishing promo button (seen on the first page of TwoMorrows' The Warren Companion) I came across this Famous Monsters Fan Club membership button!
The seller had one of those "Make Offer" buttons on the auction, so I made an offer just a few bucks shy of of what their BIN price was. Luckily they agreed and Paypal was engaged.
I love this kind of fun stuff publishers used to do to get kids more involved in their publications--buttons, proof-of-purchase mail-in items, value stamps, membership clubs, etc. It gave you a sense of community that I think is sorely lacking nowadays (ironic, since with the web it would be so much easier to do that kind of stuff if some intrepid publisher wanted to!).
