Saturday, October 06, 2012

31 Days of Dracula | Dell (1966)



It's FallCon day, so it's only appropriate that we turn to comics in today's version of Dracula. In the early '60s Dell did a series of one-shots adapting Universal's most popular monster-movies: Dracula in 1962, then Frankenstein and The Wolf Man in 1964. A couple of years later though, Monster Mania still being a big deal in the U.S., they decided to turn the characters into superheroes.

Dracula and Frankenstein were no problem as long as Dell didn't use the Universal likenesses. They even continued the numbering from the one-shots, starting the superhero versions with #2 issues. Since the Wolf Man name was trademarked by Universal, Dell renamed that series Werewolf and started with a new #1.

Chris Sims did a great write-up about all three series for Comics Alliance a couple of Halloweens ago and says that Dracula was about "a descendant of the infamous count who, when doing science! at the family castle, discovered a way to give him super-powers that included turning into a bat." Ripping off Son of Dracula, he took the name of Al U. Card and tried to clear the family name by going to the U.S. and fighting crime as a super-hero. Sims points out the big hole in that plan, but it would've been lovely to see. One of these days I have to track down those comics.

1 comment:

Wings1295 said...

Sounds fun, to me!

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