By Moench, Trinidad, Wolfman, Colan, McGregor, Ploog, Severin, Jones, Warner and Mayerik
You certainly got your money's worth in the sleazy and sexy horror magazines that Marvel used to publish, back when they still had some guts. This one-shot certainly gave it to you, with Morbius going full vamp in some gorgeous Sonny Trinidad pages, some extraordinarily gooey noir by Mike Ploog and Marie Severin (the criminally underrated Severin again providing extra value), and Val Mayerik bringing a dreamy haze to a story of a mummified dog god.
But it's a six-page Blade story from regular Tomb of Dracula collaborators Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan that hits the hardest, with the vampire hunter entering a dark old house to take down a nest of child bloodsuckers.
I first read this story as a kid myself, and there was some special horror in seeing people my size turned into undead terrors, bloody drool falling from their fangs, their eyes just pinpoints of evil light. It was the first time I had seen children used as monsters, and this one story was responsible for some specific nightmares that still linger in my mind.
And now, reading this comic as a parent, it's a whole new horror, because I have been unable to escape the cliché of being more upset by the sight of children suffering now that I have children of my own. These kid vamps might be 'older than any human', but they once had parents who lost their loved ones to this vampiric curse, and there is true tragedy behind the misty moodiness of Colan's artwork.
Blade wipes them all out in the end, because that's what Blade does, but the sight of a grown man thrusting his wooden knives into the chest of such a small creature is a whole new level of horror, from a time when black and white nastiness was everywhere.
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