Happy Hallowe'en from Dracula

Here's one I had completely forgotten I had in one of my long boxes. When Batmania hit in 1966, many publishers were unprepared for the sudden appeal of Super Heroes. I've talked a bit in the past about some of these efforts, such as Jigsaw (by Harvey), Nemesis (by ACG) and Pureheart the Powerful (by Archie). Dell Comics, while no longer the major player in the comics biz that they had been in the 1950s, obviously felt the need as well, and thus we had the brief and rather strange incarnation of Dracula as a superhero. Well, he is the original "Bat-Man".

We learn that Count Dracula is the last of his line, and "determined to clear his family name of the superstition that sets men's hearts to beating faster". He is working on a bat-derived serum to help cure brain damage. Believing he has succeeded, he has a drink in celebration, not knowing that the bat he set free had knocked over his serum, causing it to drip into his cup. He discovers:

Traveling under the name of Al U. Card (Dracula spelled backwards), he sets sail for America. But the ship he's on encounters some rough weather, and the radar isn't working. Fortunately, Dracula himself has radar as one of his powers (a bit of a mistake there, as bats actually use sonar to guide them) and, after kayoing the helmsman and taking his place:

He guides the ship to safety, but is curious as to what caused the sudden storm.

Another error there; bats have terrible eyesight, which is the reason they use sonar. Changing into his bat-form, he flies up to the dirigibles, and discovers that they are responsible for the weather modification. He's captured, but manages to convince the villain, named Admiral Maltemps, that he wants to join up:

Pretty classic villain there down to the bald head and monocle. Have you ever seen anybody with a monocle in real life? Neither have I. His plot is to devastate North America with his weather changes, causing drought in one area, floods in another and blizzards elsewhere. Nasty stuff. Dracula plans to stop him, but:

So that's the first rule of evil? I wonder what some of the others are: "Never kill the hero quickly?" The Admiral drops him to Earth, unaware that he can change into a bat and fly away. First he goes to the nearest missile base, but the general is unimpressed with his story. So he heads to Washington. And, atypically for a hero, he doesn't let anything distract him from the immediate task:

But even at the Pentagon he is unable to convince the brass of the actual situation, so he has to head back to the dirigible. We'll assume that couple on top of the car has drowned by now. Dracula takes over control of the ship, and maneuvers it above the other blimps. He unleashes the snow on them, which causes them to crash, then tackles the Admiral:

The Admiral and his men are taken into custody. Dracula heads back to the ship so he can enter the country legally, and even finds a potential girlfriend:

Comments: A silly story, but the entertainment value is pretty good and the artwork is acceptable if uninspired. One thing Dell did have over Marvel and DC; the story is a full 32 pages long; there are no ads whatsoever inside the book other than the inside back cover and back cover.

Hat Tip to Silver Age Gold, who posted a few covers from Dell's monster superhero era, for inspiring me to dig out this comic.

Blogroll Stuff

I trimmed quite a few blogs today; mostly for non-posting, but a few for non-linking. I'm happy to link other comics-related blogs, but I do ask two things: Link to me and let me know you want a link other than the generic "Great blog, I have bookmarked," crap that I see all the time from spammers. I am happy to link to actual comics bloggers, but not to Filipino Brides For Sale, etc.

I apologize again for not enabling the followers thing; I would prefer to have it on, but Blogger wants to redo my entire site in order to enable it, and I suspect I would lose the comments on all my old posts. I try to link to everybody that comments, but even there I find that often they have not bothered to link me. So I let it go for 6 months and they still haven't bothered linking. Sorry that's page rank bleed, Google it. This blog has a big page rank and I'm not giving that away to people who can't toss me a reciprocal link.

If you're still on my blogroll, don't sweat this. You're posting and you've linked back. That's all I ask. If you're suddenly not seeing my incoming link, ask yourself why and fix it then let me know. I try to be generous with my outgoing links while maintaining the focus on the Silver Age.

Update: Go check out Silver Age Gold, the first new blog on my blogroll resulting from this post. Aaron's got a good sense of humor and sincerely loves comics from the same era as I do. I love his explanation for why he blogs about the Silver Age; it mirrors my thoughts exactly!

Update II: The former Fortress Keeper has started a new blog, called The Time Bullet. It's definitely worth checking regularly. I love his post on Batman's memorable first punch. "A fitting end for his kind!"

Number 620


Halloween tales of sex and death


It's a special Halloween edition of Pappy's today, featuring two of my favorite all-time subjects, sex, as in illicit and otherwise not normal, and death, as in dead people up and walking around, looking for that aforementioned sex.

What better way to remember deceased loved ones than to have them coming in the door at midnight stinking of decomposition, rotting flesh dripping from their bones, maggots crawling from their eyesockets, looking for a little lovin'! Works for me!

First up is a tender tale of unrequited love from Twisted Tales #1, written by Bruce Jones and drawn by the incredible Alfredo Alcala. Then a story of a love worth waiting for, even after death! It's drawn by Good ol' Ghastly Graham Ingels from Vault of Horror #19. The original art scans are taken from the Heritage Auctions site.

Bonus!

From Creepy #3, a 1965 Joe Orlando-drawn tale of morbid revenge that fits into our theme. This seems like Horror Comics 101: husband killed by wife and her lover, then returns from grave. It's written by Arthur Porges, an author who wrote hundreds of stories over the years that appeared in mystery magazines like Alfred Hitchcock's, etc. He was very prolific. So what was he doing writing a pseudo-EC Comics story for Creepy, when Archie Goodwin is credited for all other stories in the magazine? Damned if I know!

I believe it was Porges' only story for Creepy. I wonder why he named the cuckolded husband Arthur, after himself...?

Fantastic Four Fridays: Skrull the Cowqueror

Our story begins with the Thing swimming menacingly towards an offshore oil rig. Say what? The Thing looks like he weights about 600 pounds and I'm going to guess that he wouldn't be able to keep his head above water. This might be very mysterious, except that we've already seen from the cover that aliens from outer space are probably behind it. In short order, we observe as Sue Storm steals a $10 million gem, the Torch ruins a fabulous statue, and Reed:

Why is the FF doing these terrible things? Oh, that's right:

The real FF is hiding out at a lodge in the woods. But the Army arrests them:

I'm guessing that Stan and Jack never heard of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military for internal police work. They imprison the FF in specially designed cells, but none of them are held captive for long. And they come up with a brilliant idea. If Johnny, as the Human Torch, destroys a rocket, the fake FF will assume he's one of them. And although it seems like a fairly ridiculous idea, it works:

Apparently the fake FF had some way they were going to destroy the missile with just the phony Reed and Sue, and it never occurred to them to wonder why the Torch showed up. So they take him back to their HQ, where the phony Torch is waiting. Fortunately Johnny has time to send out a signal flare, and the real FF has no trouble wiping out their fake counterparts. But there's still an invasion fleet of Skrulls just waiting for the defeat of the FF to conquer Earth. So the real FF pose as the Skrulls and head up to the mother ship, where they attempt to convince the commander that death and destruction await them:

Heheh, now that is pretty cool, a little plug for Marvel's monster mags of the time. They succeed in scaring away the invasion fleet, while insisting they must return to Earth to erase all evidence of their presence. But when they get back:

Well, at least this time it's the cops. They manage to convince the police to take them back to Reed's apartment, where the Skrulls are waiting:

Well, it might have been spawned on Earth back in the Hyborean Age. The FF round up those Skrulls again. They repent their ways and Reed decides to have them make one final change to their appearance, after which he hypnotizes them into forgetting their past:

One thing doesn't make sense here--well, okay, more than one thing--what happened to the fourth Skrull? I looked in the letters columns of the next few issues and didn't see any other mention of it. At one point in the story, Reed says that the fourth Skrull was on the mother ship, but that doesn't compute either, as on page 17 we hear that the FF defeated four Skrulls at Reed's apartment, and the entire FF goes up to the ship; wouldn't the commander notice that's five beings returning when only four went down?

Another note: In a subplot, the FF goes through the cosmic rays again on the return to Earth, and it results in the Thing reverting briefly into Ben Grimm again.

If you'd like to buy, there are several options:

Number 619


The Spirit of horror comics


Halloween is tomorrow. Usually Will Eisner did a Halloween story with the Spirit every year, but while this 1950 Spirit episode isn't a Halloween story, per se, it is about a guy drawing a horror comic and the Spirit shows up in the last couple of panels. That's close enough for Pappy's.

I scanned it from a British fanzine, Comic Media #10, published in 1973.

(I wonder if this story with its onomatopoeia influenced Harvey Kurtzman to write the Wally Wood story, "Sound Effects," in Mad #20?)

Tomorrow I come back with a special Saturday posting, three horror stories for Halloween!