Dracula Lives Special Edition. A voyage into the unknown.

As you may know, in my coy capacity as copious curator of this blog, I do occasionally ramble on about comics that I once owned but had forgotten all about until I'd accidentally stumbled across their covers online.

But there's another kind of comic. The kind of comic I remember having owned but that has always been an enigma to me.

One such example is the Dracula Lives Special Edition.

I remember seeing it advertised on the back of Marvel UK weeklies at some point in the 1970s and then, one Sunday, my dad returned from the shops with a copy of it.

It was something of a curiosity, having a card cover, being squarebound and printed in glorious monochrome, while featuring several tales of the Transylvanian terror.

At the the time, its nature meant I wasn't sure if it was a US Marvel publication, a Marvel UK publication or if it even had anything to do with Marvel at all. Perhaps it was some strange kind of licensed reprint deal along the lines of the ones that Alan Class had struck in the past.

I still don't know what the story behind it was but, having not seen a copy of it in over thirty years, my memories of it are vague.

All I recall is that, in one of the stories - a Gene Colan pencilled tale - one of the captions credits a character in London with being able to smell the Atlantic, which suggests he either had an incredible sense of smell or that the writer needed to invest in a map of the British Isles.

There was also a Don Heck tale that may have been called Let It Bleed, in which the vampire comes up against a giant heart in a shed.

I do remember feeling at the time that perhaps Don Heck wasn't the ideal choice to be drawing a Dracula tale, plus the idea of the bad guy being a giant heart in a shed seemed somewhat silly. I was also, at the time, completely unaware of the Rolling Stones song of the same title.

A quick Google tells me it was published by World Distributors and... ...well, nothing else. So it seems it's doomed to remain forever a mystery to me.

But perhaps that's how it should be. After all, what would Dracula be without his air of mystery?