Sheffield's Most Wanted. Part 13: Vampire Tales #10.

"Steve!" people demand. "Why did you stop doing Sheffield's Most Wanted? Was it because you feared such excitement might blow people's minds and leave them as barely more than vegetables?"

No, I tell them. It was because I'm half-senile and had totally forgotten the feature ever existed.

Well, that's all changed now because perusing my old posts has brought it back into my consciousness as never before.

And that can only mean one thing.

It's time for me to ramble on about yet another comic I never owned as a kid but always wanted to.

As a child, I only knew of Vampire Tales #10 from monochrome ads in such mags as Savage Sword of Conan and Monsters Unleashed but that was enough to grab me.

Such was the allure of those adverts that, using the most sophisticated image-processing software known to man, I've removed the colour from that cover just to remind myself of it as I know it best.

I'm not sure I knew back then who Morbius was - I almost certainly saw the ads before I'd read his debut reprinted in Spider-Man Comics Weekly - but, having experienced Marvel's other black and white titles, and one issue of Vampirella, I was well up for some magazine format vampirism.

Let's face it, who could resist a blurb like, "Even Morbius cannot survive the Plague of Blood!"?

And who could resist that cover, which the GCD informs me is by Richard Hescox, an artist of whom I must admit I know nothing.

So, there you have it; a character of whom I knew nothing, painted by an artist of whom I knew nothing, in a magazine of which I knew nothing. If that doesn't prove the power of mystery, then what could?