Dracula Lives! #9 - Marvel

You know, it occurs to me, looking at this fine cover by Luis Dominguez, that Dracula doesn't realy need to only go after hot women to drink blood from. His drive is not, for the most part, sexual in nature, so he could be just as easily satisfied by a pimply sixteen-year-old Domino's pizza guy instead of some ravishing blonde with heaving bosoms. But I guess that wouldn't make for as exciting a cover.

On the inside cover, Tony Isabella and Ernie Chua give us some helpful tips on "How to Ward Off Vampires", and then the first story is "The Lady Who Collected Dracula" by Doug Moench, the underrated Frank Robbins, and Frank Springer.

I admit, when I was a kid I really hated Robbins work--it just looked so weird to me--but over the years I've grown to appreciate that oddness, and his wonderful sense of movement. When I opened this issue for the first time and saw he did the pencilling, I was jazzed. It's a ca-ra-zee story about a woman obsessed with collecting artifacts concerned with vampirism, and let's nothing get in her way of obtaining them, like a lot of comic collectors I know. Robbins' work is equally crazy and kinetic here, a fine job.

Next is "Scarlet in Glory!" by Moench, Paul Gulacy, and Mike Esposito, about a former victim plotting his revenge on the Lord of the Undead. Not a bad story, but you can barely see any Gulacy under Esposito's heavy inks, and the story never really takes off.

There's a text article called "The Scars of Dracula" by Gerry Boudreau, a scathing review of the same-titled Hammer film.

Next is "A Night in the Unlife!" by Gerry Conway and Alfredo Alcala, about a small-time crook who runs afoul of Dracula. Nice art by Alcala that practically drips mood off the page.

Last is "Twice Dies the Vampire!" by Conway and Sonny Trinidad, about Drac running into a mysterious garbed gentlemen whose very touch can kill! Dracula finally meets someone his own size, so to speak, and it gives him pause.

The issue wraps up with a letters page, and all in all a pretty good issue. A lot of the filler material(reprints, vampire movie stills with comic balloons dropped in) is gone, making room for more original material, which is always nice. The art in this issue is uniformily good, especially Robbins.