MYTHCOMICS: "DRACULA STILL LIVES" (VAMPIRELLA #18, 1972)

 

During Archie Goodwin's run of Vampirella stories, which concluded with "And Be a Bride of Chaos", the writer revised the origin of Vampirella from what Forrest Ackerman had written. Turnabout being fair play, T. Casey Brennan, who took over as regular scripter of the Vampirella stories in issue #17, then revised what Goodwin had written about Dracula in issue #16. The result was, among other things, a stronger evocation of the Superman-myth than either Ackerman or Goodwin had managed.

"Lives" picks up directly from the conclusion of "Chaos," where the master vampire was buried when the chaos-gods he had worshiped brought his castle tumbling down. However, in the midst of the bloodsucker ranting about his plans to seek vengeance upon Vampirella, an apparition appears before him.

Contrary to what the editorial notes claim, the Conjuress did not appear in VAMPIRELLA #16. Possibly Brennan recycled her from some other script which I've not read, but what happens in the Goodwin script is that Dracula, a native of Vampirella's homeworld, commits a mortal sin by preying on his fellows, rather than drinking the blood supplied by the planet. The Drakulonians sentence the transgressor to disintegration, but the device actually propels Dracula into the realm of the chaos-god. That's the only entity the vampire encounters in the Goodwin tale, but Brennan counts on 1972 readers not to obsess about those details, and finds a totally different path to associate Dracula with the domain of chaos.

Meanwhile, Vampirella has been having some melodrama with her boyfriend Adam and Adam's father Conrad Van Helsing. Then the elder vamp-slayer gets a psychic hotline, informing him that Drac is back. Those psychic senses also tell Conrad that the master vampire is not on Earth, so the resourceful slayer uses Merlin's Mirror to send the hot-blooded heroine after him.

In the other dimension, Conjuress tells Dracula that he can only renounce the evil in his heart by lying on the "altar of repentance" and reflecting on his sins. Then she leaves, and Vampirella shows up, expecting a fight. What she gets is a revised origin for Dracula--which in essence, recasting the Count as Jor-El from the Superman mythos, the lonely voice trying to convince his people that their planet is doomed.

Dracula seeks to save his world with ancient witchcraft, summoning the Conjuress. She obligingly reveals a ritual that can be used to renew the planet's rivers of nourishing blood. However, the Conjuress leaves Dracula alone to complete the ritual, and his altruism has become tainted by his lust for the beauteous goddess. Because of Dracula's wayward spirit, the God of Chaos tempts him to abandon the path of goodness. Not only does this faux Jor-El not save his world, he preys on his fellows, and that's what gets him executed. Chaos then sends Drac to Earth to gather more sacrifices, which is how he crosses paths with Vampirella. Having heard the reboot origin, Vampi tries to put an end to Dracula's evil. 

However, she can't bring herself to do it, not least because she herself has committed similar sins. Back in the real world, Conrad decides to smash the mirror-portal to protect his son from the bloodsucking beauty. However, the Conjuress shows up to reveal to Vampirella that she could not have killed Drac had she tried, for the experience in the other dimension was a test of Vampi's ability to conquer her "animalistic instincts," as much as giving Drac the chance to repent. So the mystic maiden sends the heroine back home.

However, moments later, Dracula comes to and becomes incensed at having been vulnerable to his enemy. He ignores the Conjuress' blandishments about reformation and re-dedicates himself to being "the personification of evil."

The parallelism of Drac and Vampi here is somewhat undercut by the next three Vampirella stories, in which the Conjuress talks Dracula into getting back on the path of atonement. These are all decent stories, but they lack the symbolic density that makes "Dracula Still Lives" a memorable mythcomic, combining the metaphysical tropes of world-salvation and self-abnegation with the psychological tropes of forbidden love and the deep attractions of transgression.

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.

BRONZE AGE THOUGHTS

I recently came across this Roy Thomas observation from DRACULA LIVES #1 (1973):

"It's our firm conviction that at least a sizable portion of the future of comics lies in a larger, more expensive, even more mature product than today's color-comics market is structured to allow. In a day when Playboy and other magazines sell for a buck (and more, on such gala holidays as Christmas, New Year, and Hugh Hefner's birthday)--in a day when a forty- or fifty cent cover price is possible only to a magazine of tremendous initial circulation--in short, in a time of creeping inflation, rampant overcrowding of the newsstands--we felt that, even though Marvel's popularity is at an all-time high, we'd be fools and klutzes not to experiment with other prices, other sizes, other formats."

It's my theory that what Thomas was saying in '73 was by then common wisdom for Marvel since about 1970-71. I've always considered the Bronze Age-- which I place in 1970-- to be a new era because that's when the Big Two took their first faltering steps toward "adult entertainment," as represented by Marvel's CONAN and DC's GREEN LANTERN. I must admit that there's a big marketing difference in the two, since the former was aiming for success based on the popularity of the paperback Howard reprints while the latter was a gamble aimed at keeping a failing book alive.  Still, both are predicated on appealing to non-juvenile interests.

That Thomas was thinking in this wise long before 1973 is evinced in the 1971 premiere of SAVAGE TALES, for which Roy is billed as "associate editor." The idea of appealing to an older market would be a logical step since it's commonly asserted that sales in the late 1960s went way down, as the superhero bubble, prompted in part by the BATMAN teleseries, went kerblooey.

Marvel-- which also attempted to corner the underground market with the 1974-76 COMIX BOOK-- seems to have been more heavily invested in developing this market than DC, or even Warren. I've read very little of Silver Age Warren, so I don't know if its horror and war stories were on a par with the more mature stories of EC Comics, nor do I know whether or not the Warren audience skewed older than that of Marvel and DC. Warren did begin VAMPIRELLA in 1969, so that would seem to be a more overt courting of an adult audience by Warren, using sex-and-violence in much the same way Marvel used Conan. 

On a side-note, I'd opine that the Marvel guys never seemed to get a handle on adult horror: most of the b&w horror stuff had the same tone as the color comics.  

In 1973 it probably made all the sense in the world to assume that magazines would be a secure foundation on which a comics-company could build. For one thing, the company could expect to raise prices when other magazines did, and not lose out, as DC allegedly did when they tried to maintain 25-cent comics against Marvel's 20-centers.  But then, who could have predicted that the digital revolution would come close to making all magazine entertainment irrelevant?