After the success of my story yesterday on race relations in Captain America of the 1970's I feel compelled to write about a less succesful handling of similar topics in the same time period and art form.  First let me devolve into a meaningful tangent...

Whenever I see horror comics in the comic stores I think back to the movie "Lost Boys" where Corey Feldman searches the boardwalk comic book shop for back issues of Superman or Batman.  The Frog brothers, Corey Haim and the other guy, promote what looks like the cover of a "Tomb of Dracula" comic book, and Feldman turns it down, saying simply, "I don't read horror comics."  The Frog brothers don't take no for an answer, insisting "this comic book could save your life."  So Corey complies and reads up on his vampire mythos through the original American media of comic books. (And yes I probably switched my Coreys - I never get them straight).

As a young reader I was like Corey, I didn't read horror comics.  For me it wasn't a matter of being scared, it was a matter of not being scared.  No offense to Marv Wolfman, but any print media has trouble competing with movies when it comes to scares.  The type of full emmersion one gets inside a movie theater is very different from that within a book, or at least it has been so for me. There is a scare in the Tomb of Dracula series of 1978 however, and that is the fear of blacksploitation in the creation of the character Blade the Vampire Slayer.

Now don't get me wrong, the Wesley Snipes version of Blade kicks proverbial ass, and I hope desperately they will make another for the theatres, as the television series stalled too early for my liking.  But when you look at Blade's beginnings in Tomb of Dracula #10 you see a different kind of black super hero, no less courageous and powerful, but written with too much jive and anti-honky resentment.  Sure all characters take years to evolve but to show how far we've come I would like to review some of the funnier toying with the English language that was captured.

In the opening scene Blade takes on three vampires and cuts them down without a problem, whereas in the series so far, catching a vampire has proven highly difficult.  Immediately we see that Blade has some form of special power that means he does not have to leave the stake in the vampire's heart, all he has to do is stab the heart with his teak knife and the guy goes down.  Suspect, but after all, this is a comic book.

Harker, a descendant of the Harker's who fought Bram Stoker's Dracula in an interesting piece of intertextualization, comes out of the shadows and gives Blade a hard time, claiming he wanted to follow these vampires back to their master, Dracula, who they are always looking for as such is the nature of the drama.

Blade mouths wise with Harker, "I'll find the Count- an' I'll kill 'im like that, too.  Gotta be goin' now -- check up on some clues I got.  Seeya Gramps, and sharpen up your wooden nickles, dig?"  Fairly innocent jive I suppose, but when considered as the attitude Blade adopts with Harker and his growing group of vampire hunters, it seems clear that Blade has a chip on his shoulder, and of course in the tumultuous times of the civil rights battles of the 1970's, his fighting spirit reflected a distrust of whites that was common.  Still Harker explains to his daughter who considers Blade "rude", "Perhaps, Edith -- But in his own way, he gets the job done..."

The next time we see Blade is in the same comic book where he climbs aboard the ovean liner that is taking Dracula from London to the US as a special guest.  Blade uses scuba gear to detect the massive cruiser and then repels upward with his tanks still on his back.  Dracula seems to dominate their ensuing fight, until the humans on the boat come to Blade's rescue and push Dracula away by sheer force of numbers.  Blade planned to blow up the ship, hoping to catch Dracula on it, but the Master Vampire escapes and Blade has to convince all the humans on board to jump ship or be reduced to chum for the sharks.  All in all a convoluted plot and a less than stellar comic book altogether, but the first appearance of Blade make the book worthwhile. (Or purchase it in black and whit in Tomb of Dracula Essentials Vol. 1 - That's what I did).

Basically Blade has an attitude about working with other vampire slayers, and unfortunately it sits on a racial divide in this issue.  I also missed the part of his origin where he was born of a vampire, so he is half human/half vampire as in the movies.  He does represent a significant foil when compared to the lily white team under Harkness, but what this says about race relations is a little backwards.  Again we have a stereotype of a black male, too headstrong to get along with those who could help him and need his help.  Completely bogus, but a popular misconception.  Wolfman is busy creating an iconic figure, but he cuts him initially from whole cloth and it will be interesting to see when Blade earns his wings so to speak.

I suppose what bothered me the most was the inability of the vampire hunters to work together, it smacked too much of separate but equal, and Blade gets blamed even after he kills three vampires on his own, a task beyond that of any of Harkness' crew.

Looking to how Blade evolves over time will solve a lot of the issues I have brought up, and as I said, Blade is an incredible hero on the large and small screen. But Wesley Snipe's perfectly half-evil ways are not here in Tomb of Dracula #10, and it may not be here where they gestate. Still, if you want to know about vampires, and can't find some tutelage from the Frog brothers, then look no further than the pages of Tomb of Dracula, there you will find all you need to know.