Posts

Showing posts from October, 2011

Dracula: Review,commentary (Sitting Up With the Undead)

Image
To enter the world of Dracula as born in the pages of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel is sleep walk into a night world of mysteries. Every good vampire story, and no less, its Undead Lord, unveils itself in a unhurried tease of facts. I attempted to take myself back to the readership which did not know what was coming next, nor the nature of the menace itself. Only Van Helsing suspects and researches the truth of what they face, and in an age of Victorian reliance on science and common sense, he holds this close to the vest as long as possible, lest none believe him. I realize most of us followed the introduction of the character through his famous movie incarnations, not to mention the proliferation of his and other vampire imagery throughout popular culture. Vampires were long part of folklore, in Japan, India, and the Balkan states from which Stoker drew his gypsies, his Transylvania. Thanks to Stoker, and most of all Legosi, Hammer Films and all that followed, they are part of our...

Happy Halloween! Dracula LIves! The Best of Tomb of Dracula

Image
Here are some of my favorite cover images from the series: This one, in particular, is the first one I remember, appearing in Mighty Marvel Checklist of my copy of Marvel Tales #66, 1976, one of my first comics, bought as a surprise at a surplus store by my parents---one of their very few gifts of comics, but all the ones in my kids year were pivotal! Despite their great showdown, Harker's not on the cover of TOD #70 below. Truthfully, cool as this is for showing them in battle and Dracula using his powers, the one; (#32) where Harker's crawling away just barely out of reach of the flying Dracula is just tight, tight, TIGHT! Finally, it looks like the eventual conclusion to the Domini storyline had some pretty cool execution, though Wolfman had to know the end of the series drew upon the horizon by this point. In chronological order, these are the last four of my picks from the Tomb of Dracula four color series by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, with Tom Palmer and ...

To play the vampire! Rome Little Theatre's Dracula

http://romelittletheatre.com/files_2/Dracula%20show%20poster.pdf http://romelittletheatre.com/ friend got sick waiting for pictures

Back to the Bite: Dracula's female predecessor

wiki from; carmilla; by Sheridan Le Fanu Carmilla selected exclusively female victims, though only became emotionally involved with a few. Carmilla had nocturnal habits, but was not confined to the darkness. She had unearthly beauty and was able to change her form and to pass through solid walls. Her animal alter ego was a monstrous black cat, not a large dog as in Dracula. She did, however, sleep in a coffin.  Some critics, among them William Veeder, suggest that Carmilla, notably in its outlandish use of narrative frames, was an important influence on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Although Carmilla is a lesser known and far shorter Gothic vampire story than the generally-considered master work of that genre, Dracula, the latter is heavily influenced by Le Fanu's short story.  In the earliest manuscript of Dracula, dated 8 March 1890, the castle is set in Styria, although the setting was changed to Transylvania six days later. Stoker's posthumously published...

haunted halloween from the Tomb of Dracula! Resurrected

Image
sorry! have to replace my keyboard! update soon! Lue Six #28 (#s 26-29) four! But one story, really. 27’s a most bitchin’ one, but #29’s so poignant. Five #32 Dracula 30-33 There’s four! But, another story, a single post. Diary, cross-threading plots These two multi-part stories made a fast paced ride of terror in their serial form, published in 1974.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: Patsy Walker and the revenge of the romance comic

Image
When Patsy Walker gained the costume and powers of Hellcat in Avengers #144, the character was not, pardon the expression, made from whole cloth. In fact, writer Steve Englehart had rescued her from cancellation and obscurity by bringing her into the superhero comics of the day as a friend to his newly-transformed Hank McCoy, a.k.a. the Beast, created from X-Men comics. Patsy was the stand-alone survivor now of what was once the biggest comics genre of its day, a day when women readers, female adults, no less, were the surprising core of comics readership in America. From the site, "A very brief history of romance comics": For the first and last time, adult women were major consumers of comics. (A)lthough the genre is largely dismissed by comics aficionados today, it was created by two of the most revered artists and writers of the time: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, who kicked off Young Romance in 1947. Kirby and Simon had created Captain America in the early '40s, and Ki...