Editor Ira is here to talk about Dracula in the comics!

Superhero comics have drawn on horror tropes basically from the start. Batman based his whole deal on striking fear into the hearts of criminals. Spider-Man has gone up against a couple dozen varieties of Goblins. Heroes like The Spectre and Ghost Rider are agents of damnation passing terrifying judgments on the wicked. Even with an endless palate of spooky-scaries at their disposal, though, comics creators have never been able to resist the allure of the classics. That's why Dracula is a canonical character in both the DC and Marvel comics universes. Today I'd like to walk you through Dracula's peculiar history in Marvel properties, which includes his single greatest incarnation ever to grace a TV screen.

Despite being in the public domain, Dracula didn't join the Marvel family until the '70s. That's because of the Comics Code Authority, a strict set of rules governing the content of mainstream comic books. The CCA was established in 1954 in response to a moral panic set off by the popularity of horror, crime, and war comics amongst young readers. This was a big deal at the time. There was a congressional inquiry and everything, with psychologists and parents' groups testifying that comic books were leading kids into a spiral of moral depravity. This being the '50s, there were some threats of Communism mixed in there too. In their partial defense, there really was some dark and gruesome stuff populating the comics stands, at least by the standards of the mid-1950s. As usual, though, the censors chucked the baby right out with the bathwater.

With the threat of congressional action looming, the big players in the comics industry chose to adopt a voluntary code that sharply restricted the levels of violence, sexuality, cursing, drug use, and disturbing themes that could be depicted in their stories. Predictably, the code grossly overcompensated, eliminating virtually anything that could be considered adult-oriented and even throwing in stipulations that villains must always lose, law enforcement must always be in the right, and "suggestive postures" were beyond the pale. You know those listicles about the weird old storylines where Batman fights Zebra Batman or Wonder Woman battles space cowboys with a giant magnet? Since the writers had to come up with superhero content scrubbed of most aspects of realistic crime fighting, you can pretty much thank the Comics Code for those.

The code also put severe limits on how comics handled horror, including banning words like "terror" and "weird" from their titles and making vampires, zombies, and werewolves monstera non grata. That essentially meant that comic books were held to a more restrictive standard than, say, "The Munsters." It stayed that way until 1971, when the code was loosened after the U.S. government directly asked Marvel to write some anti-drug storylines that went beyond CCA guidelines. The resulting tweaks allowed for the use of characters from existing works of literature, which opened the door for classic monsters to return to the comics.

Dracula quickly got his own title in a line of horror-specific Marvel comics, but it didn't take long for the writers to pit him against Spider-Man. Since then, various incarnations of The Count have been regular antagonists for a wide range of Marvel heroes, including the X-Men, Hulk, and Blade (duh). Deadpool stole his fiancée. His son made Jubilee a vampire. Like anyone who watched trailers in a movie theater in the past few years, he has a complicated relationship with Morbius. He inspired a (NSFW) Moon Knight meme that isn't canon but absolutely should be.

For my money, though, the single greatest intersection of Marvel and Dracula happened not on the page, but on Saturday morning TV screens. Dracula turns up in a few early Marvel animation projects, including the lead role in a 1980 anime film that's reputedly just awful, and an episode of "Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends" where he tries to make Firestar his vampire bride with the help of Frankenstein's monster and a wolfman. That same trio previously appeared in the reliably bizarre 1979 "Spider-Woman" cartoon, and it is arguably the crowning moment for every character involved.

The "Dracula's Revenge" episode of "Spider-Woman" defies every piece of vampire lore you thought you knew. After Dracula is accidentally freed by grave robbers, he gets in a scrap with the titular hero and then heads to the Van Helsing estate. There, he transforms his nemesis and all of his dinner guests into vampires not by biting their necks or putting them in his thrall, but by zapping them with lasers he generates from his body. He then unearths the tombs of Frankenstein and the Wolfman (seems like a bad idea to have them all buried in the same town), and the three set out on a mission to make the whole world into monsters using their unexplained laser biotechnology.

Now look, I understand that children's TV standards of the era wouldn't allow for monsters running around mauling civilians. From that angle, I can kind of forgive the weirdness of Dracula and the Wolfman creating new acolytes via magic body lasers. After all, transforming innocent people into monsters is a key element of vampire and werewolf lore. But Frankenstein… he's famously a synthetic simulation of life assembled from stolen body parts. The idea of him turning living people into reanimated corpse mashups by blasting them with mysterious energy beams raises a ton of logistical, theoretical, and even theological questions. But that's what happens here, and it's one-hundred percent glorious.

Anyway, Spider-Woman figures out a way to shut down Dracula by using her venom blasts to create artificial sunlight or some such nonsense. That also apparently works on the other monsters, even though I'm pretty sure neither werewolves nor Frankensteins are canonically harmed by sunlight. To my knowledge, that's the last appearance we've gotten from this particular laser-blasting incarnation of Marvel's Dracula, which means we're long overdue. Imagine how much more fun "The Eternals" would've been if they were fighting a bunch of laser-Frankensteins instead of, uh, whatever the bad guy was in "The Eternals."