Tomb of Dracula #1

History

The title had a famously tangled gestation: publisher Martin Goodman had originally envisioned it as a black-and-white anthology, then as an oversized 25-cent color book, before it finally reached stands as a standard 20-cent color comic after repeated delays caused in part by a printer overloaded with Marvel's format changes. The scripting credit on the splash page reads Gerry Conway alone, but Roy Thomas has documented in the Marvel Masterworks introduction that Stan Lee dictated a skeletal premise, Thomas fleshed it out into a full plot, and Conway — then roughly eighteen years old — handled the dialogue, with Conway having no creative input until the art was already complete. Gene Colan lobbied actively for the penciling assignment, and according to Thomas, had the artist not pushed for it the job might well have gone to Bill Everett; Colan also inked his own pages here, something he would not do again on the series, reportedly because the book had been originally designed for black-and-white reproduction and his gray wash tones did not translate cleanly to the color printing. Neal Adams, working separately from Colan's interior design, painted the cover — producing a Dracula whose appearance differed noticeably from the character Colan visualized inside, with Colan basing his version on actor Jack Palance rather than any previous screen incarnation.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First Marvel Comics appearance of Dracula in the Silver/Bronze Age color continuity (Earth-616); the issue shipped November 16, 1971 with an April 1972 cover date.
• First appearances of Frank Drake (Dracula's American descendant and series co-lead), Clifton Graves (Drake's treacherous companion who inadvertently resurrects the Count), and Jeanie (Drake's girlfriend, turned into a vampire within this single issue).
• Abraham van Helsing appears only in flashback; his surname is misspelled 'van Helfing' in the issue — a typo not corrected until Rachel van Helsing's introduction in issue #3.
• Danny Summers appears only in flashback, establishing prior backstory for Frank Drake.
• Clifton Graves resurrects Dracula by pulling the wooden stake from his skeletal remains in the castle tomb — the central plot mechanism of the debut.
• The cover was drawn by Neal Adams; interior pencils and inks are entirely by Gene Colan, the only issue of the 70-issue run on which Colan inked his own work.
• The Comics Code Authority's February 1971 rule revisions explicitly permitted vampires in color comics for the first time, making this series possible as a Code-approved publication.
• The issue has been reprinted extensively, including in Essential Tomb of Dracula Vol. 1 (2004), the Tomb of Dracula Omnibus Vol. 1 (2008), Marvel Masterworks: Tomb of Dracula Vol. 1 (2021), and a direct Facsimile Edition (December 2022).

Cast · 6 characters

Full credits

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