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.
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