NEAR-MYTHS: "AND BE A BRIDE OF CHAOS" (VAMPIRELLA #16, 1971)

The iconic character of Vampirella was launched in the first issue of her titular (heh) magazine in 1969. Visually conceived by Trina Robbins, her first two adventures were written by FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND editor Forrest J. Ackerman and penciled respectively by Tom Sutton and Mike Royer. In keeping with Ackerman's reputation in FMOF for ghastly puns, the first two stories were very silly comedies with lots of adolescent titillation. The second story shows what would have become of the series had Ackerman been its regular scribe, depicting Vampirella auditioning for a "monster beauty contest" and being flown to Hollywood for a screen test.

But I give Ackerman (and any unbilled collaborators) for one strong mythic concept; Vampirella's origin. In keeping with increasing numbers of science-fictional vampires in pop culture, the bloodsucking heroine was an alien, born on the planet "Drakulon." The inhabitants of the planet were not undead, but they had many characteristics of Earth-vamps: superior strength, the ability to change into bats, and hypnosis. But instead of feeding on other beings, they were sustained by the literal life's blood of their planet. Instead of "flowing with milk and honey" as in the metaphor for Israel in the Bible, Drakulon flows with rivers of blood, and all Drakulonians can nurture themselves from this fluid. (If I thought Ackerman was a close reader I'd be tempted to think he remembered a remark from Stoker's Count about the soil of Transylvania has been "enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders.") At any rate, the rivers dry up from a blistering drought, though Ackerman never says that this is a permanent situation. Vampirella is alerted that an alien spaceship has crashed in the area of "Gosi-Bram" (guess where FJA got that name) so she checks it out. She then cheerily slaughters the Earth astronauts to drink their blood and implicitly pilots the ship back to Earth for her second and last Acker-adventure.

Concurrently with these two adventures, Vampirella also played "horror-host" to all of the anthology-stories in the title. The fact that publisher James Warren didn't use her anything but a horror-host in issues #3-7 suggests that he didn't really think of her as a continuing protagonist. Possibly fan-reaction prompted him to enlist writer Archie Goodwin and artist Tom Sutton to reboot the extraterrestrial bloodsucker for a series (though she continued to double as a horror-host, ushering in and concluding terror-tales with EC-esque bad puns.)

In VAMPIRELLA #8 (1970) Goodwin reshuffled the events of the origin-story to assert that "Vampi," as she was sometimes called, was the only survivor of Drakulon's deadly drought, and that she escaped to Earth for sheer survival. (The parallels to Superman's origin should be self-evident.) Since Vampi had no raison d'etre, Goodwin had her pursued by two sets of opponents. Picking up a tossed-off plot-thread from VAMPIRELLA #2, Goodwin imagined that Vampi, said in issue #2 to have drunk the blood of some plane-crash victims, just happened to fang the body of a man who was a descendant of Stoker's vampire-hunter Doctor Van Helsing. Conrad Van Helsing, brother of the contemporary fellow, swore to hunt down the vamp who defiled his brother's corpse, and brought along his handsome son Adam. Eventually the hunters become Vampi's allies when convinced of her relative virtuousness. Not so the other set of opponents: a demon-worshiping sect called the Cult of Chaos.

VAMPIRELLA #16 links the premiere pop-culture vampire to the Cult, when Vampirella is abducted by Dracula himself. The story reveals that centuries ago Dracula, actually an inhabitant of Drakulon, was sentenced to death for having preyed upon his fellow citizens' blood rather than simply drinking from the rivers. 

However, by chance the authorities' attempt to disintegrate Dracula cause him to be flung into the dimension of the Mad God Chaos, who enlists the alien as a servant. Dracula is sent to Earth's medieval era, where his alien nature is changed by the new world's atmosphere, so that he becomes vulnerable to sunlight. He eventually recapitulates the broad outlines of the Stoker story and is slain by Van Helsing. Eventually revived, he immediately goes looking to find a "Bride of Chaos" to sacrifice to his demon lord.

The revision of Dracula's origin, particularly the part in which he's exiled for transgressing against his people's laws, is the only mythic part of the story. It's a very weak effort from the usually dependable Goodwin, with Vampi only escaping the sacrificial altar because another Chaos-cultist wants the "honor" of being the bride. However, the tale does establish a pattern of conflict between the famed vampire-lord and the Last Daughter of Drakulon, a pattern that would appear in other reboots and adaptations.

ANOTHER QUICK POST-PRESERVATION

I'm participating in a discussion of Forrest J. Ackerman's dubious legacy on the Classic Horror Film Board, and decided to preserve  a couple of my comments here, possibly for fuller development than can be presented on a messboard.

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Following up on some of the posts that talk about the difficulty of separating the artist from his art-- or in Ackerman's case, the laborer from his labor-- it helps me to consider that even "depraved" people may have periods of inspiration in which they do or make things that prove valuable to a lot of other people. However, when the inspiration passes, a lot of times they just go back to being plain old crappy people, whether they're perpetually on the make, or swindling victims, or praising fascists.

The point's been made before that not everything depraved in one time-frame is depraved in another, so I won't belabor it, except to state that the point is more of a cautionary warning than an endorsement of relativism.

AND

Well, FJA wasn't a scholar, not even an amateur one, so I don't know that there's any reason for anyone to quote him about anything. For all I know he may have made various pretenses toward scholarship, but I haven't seen them in my few copies of FM. His whole persona hinges on communicating a "gosh-wow" attitude about the things he loved, or said he loved, to his monster-philic readers. I don't have any firm memories of my early encounters with issues of FM, except that when I first laid eyes on a newsstand copy of THE MONSTER TIMES, I remember thinking, "Hey, this has real substantive articles in it, not like FAMOUS MONSTERS!" (Or thoughts to that effect.)

For me his main virtue was that of creating a sense that the overlapping worlds of "SF/F/H" were not just a bunch of unrelated productions. Good and bad, they were all part of a greater whole, and that whole was of interest to fandom, whether the reader was learning about the latest Hammer production or some silent film that came about before the reader was ever born. Of course, one may say that keeping track of everything gave FJA a lot of grist for his publication-mill; but that's the bottom line for almost every endeavor. Somewhere or other I read that he didn't even really like horror that much; that "sci-fi" was his true love. But in terms of his effect, he did get across that sense of "fan-connectedness," which I assume is the main reason people made the trek to visit the Ackermansion.