Vampire Tales #4 - Marvel

April 1974 - Despite my timing this week of updates to count down to Halloween, there's been a relative lack of horrorific content! So let's change that with a look at Marvel's Vampire Tales magazine.

The cover, by Boris Vallejo, is superb--the staging, the lighting, the blood-red gown--all of it nearly perfect. I especially love the detail he put into this guy:

...that's an exquisitely rendered person, all the more amazing when you realize he's not the thing most people would be looking at. Nice job, Mr. Vallejo!

This issue is in really good shape, a steal at the $2 I paid for it--except for the absurdly giant "12" some newsvendor slapped on the cover with a grease pencil. The only comic book markdown that can be seen from space!

The issue gets off to a good start right on the first page, with a very inventive use of an old movie still (a frequent ingredient with these magazines) combined with the table of contents:

...very nice!

Despite the cover, this issue's lead feature is Morbius, The Living Vampire, in "Lighthouse of the Possessed" by Don McGregor and the always-distinctive Tom Sutton:

Sutton's work is more cartoony than the standard Marvel style, but somehow it seems to make everything heightened: the slime slimier, the girls sexier, the violence more horrible. A solid story (involving some killings going on at a spooky lighthouse) brought to vivid life by Sutton.

After a text piece by Chris Claremont about "real" vampires, and an unusual one-pager by Gerry Conway (where he talks about how he doesn't want to write said piece), is "Somewhere Waits The Vampire" with art by Paul Reinman:

Its a reprint from Journey Into Unknown Worlds #27 (Marvel regularly filled outs its b/w line with reprints from the 50s and 60s), so it has a much more reserved tone than the lead. But in this particular story about a woman in love with a vampire, it features some surprisingly lurid images:

Usually, vampires in 50s comics were drawn like Bela Lugosi--clearly a vampire, but still recognizably human. Here, Reinman has him look more rodent-ish, like Nosferatu. No wonder this young girl's father is so determined to keep them apart!

Next is "A Vampire's Home Is His Castle", by the prolific Doug Moench with art by Lombardia:

Despite this impressive opening shot, the rest of the art is fairly dull. Not bad, just dull. It almost makes up for it with its goofy, absurdist ending.

Next is a text piece called "Hell House Is Dying" by McGregor, then its time for another reprint, the EC-ish "The Vampire's Coffin!", drawn by Tony DiPreta, from Mystery Tales #15:

The last story is the cover feature, "The Drifting Snow", by Tony Isabella (adapted from the story by August Derleth) and drawn, in a tour de force, by Estaban Maroto:

A genuinely spooky story (about a family stuck inside a snow-covered mansion), with an amazing art job by Maroto. Considering the reproduction quality of some of these magazines, its stunning, the sheer amount of detail and linework Maroto put in his pages. I can only imagine what his originals must have looked like, coming into the Marvel offices for the first time.

Marvel found room for one more feature, slipping it onto the inside back cover--one those "true legends of..." pieces, this time about Lilith: The First Vampire:

I've always enjoyed these little one-pagers, usually done by Isabell and Ernie Chua. Maybe, because of their brevity, they have to be open-ended, or the fact that they mix real life and fantasy. I'd love to see these all collected somewhere.




Today's Angelique Trouvere glossy up for grabs: