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?

Happy fortieth birthday to Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives!

Thanks to Colin Jones for pointing out that this is a very special week indeed for all British comics fans.

For it was forty years ago this week that Marvel UK unleashed two new mags on an unsuspecting public.

One of those mags was Planet of the Apes and the other was Dracula Lives.

Of the two comics, it would have seemed reasonable to assume that it'd be Dracula Lives that would have the longer shelf life, seeing as Planet of the Apes was launched purely to cash in on a TV show that failed to catch light so badly that it only managed to run for a few months before never being seen again.

On the other hand, Dracula Lives was built around classic characters who'd proven their staying power by already having had a long and distinguished career long before the comic had even been conceived.

But how wrong we'd have been in such an assumption. Dracula Lives was finally staked through the heart with issue #87, being forced to merge with its sister title, whilst Planet of the Apes held on for a walloping one hundred and twenty three issues before merging with Mighty World of Marvel where such simian adventures never quite fitted in with the likes of the Hulk, Daredevil and Captain Marvel.

Bearing in mind that Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's Dracula tales were nearly always more compelling than Marvel's ape-based fare, I can only assume that Dracula Lives' shorter lifespan was down to the fact that its back-up strips - featuring the likes of Frankenstein and Werewolf by Night - were noticeably weaker than such Planet of the Apes' backup strips as Ka-Zar, the Black Panther and Adam Warlock.

Or perhaps, by the 1970s, such traditional horror characters were merely seen as being too corny to live.

Whatever the reason, while I had every issue ever published of Planet of the Apes, I think I only ever had two issues of Dracula Lives, one of which I recall reading whilst stood just inside the entrance of Pauldins department store in Sheffield city centre.

Sadly, like Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives, Pauldins is no more. A grim reminder that, like the king of the vampires, ultimately everything in life will one day be reduced to dust.