Tomb of Dracula #11

August 1974
"The Voodoo-Man!"
Marv Wolfman (writer), Gene Colan (pencils), Jack Abel (inks), Petra Goldberg (colors), Tom Orzechowski (letters), Roy Thomas (editor)

Dracula flies back to England, musing that he once believed that his vampirism was a curse and now he is convinced that vampirism "is the answer to man's dreams of immortality!" Safe in his tomb, Dracula decides to exact revenge from the motorcycle gang that nearly killed him. Elsewhere the leader of the same motorcycle gang, Brand, is getting instructions from Jason Faust, a voodoo practitioner restricted to an iron lung outfitted with mechanical arms who orders Brand and his gang to go after one of the men he holds responsible for his sickness. The gang crosses paths with Frank and Rachel in London, who decide to go see a play based on the novel "Dracula."

Later Brand confronts a banker named Oliver, who stopped Faust from cashing in his bonds to pay for an operation that might have saved him from the iron lung. Brand uses a voodoo doll to inflict pain on Oliver, but he stops and leaves when it turns out that Oliver has a security camera in his office. However, Brand sends a signal to Faust, who uses his own voodoo doll to inflict crippling, lifelong pain on Oliver. Later Faust relates to Brand that years ago in Haiti the man who is to be the gang's next victim, his business partner Laswell, had left him to the tender mercies of a hostile shaman, who tortured him with voodoo, leaving him crippled. When Dracula finally tracks the gang down, he instead finds Laswell's corpse and finds that, by coincidence, the gang's last victim in Quincy Harker, who unfortunately had advised Faust and Laswell to do business in Haiti to begin with. Dracula stops Brand from signaling Faust in time and hypnotizes and orders all the members of the gang except Brand to ride their bikes to the cliffs of Dover and commit suicide. As for Brand, Dracula turns him into a vampire and sends him to likewise turn Faust into a vampire. Faust manages to detail Brand using voodoo, but not before he succeeds in his mission and the newly vampirized Faust, still trapped in his iron lung, can only wait to be killed by sunlight the coming morning.

Comments

This story really does get at the heart of what Wolfman did to make the series work; he actually made Dracula, not the vampire hunters, the center of the plot, and it makes for a more interesting series all around. This issue the plot is stretched a little too thin, leaving some wrinkles like the bizarre coincidence that one of Faust's planned victims would happen to be Quincy Harker (at least Wolfman pokes a little fun at himself in the narrative panels: "If this were a story, we could chalk it all to coincidence - to the turns and fancies of a writer's mind - but this is more than just a simple tale..."), how someone who can't afford an operation can still afford an iron lung (with mechanical arms, to boot) and hire a motorcycle gang, and the question of how exactly Dracula figures out what Jason Faust is up to is left in the air (the implication seems to be that Dracula has been around enough to recognize death by voodoo when he sees it, but with all due respect I don't think Wolfman was all that interested in patching up every little plot hole). It still works even better than you'd expect a "Dracula versus a voodoo-using motorcycle gang" story would.

Footnotes

Page 6, Panel 1 - It's little known in most circles nowadays, but there was a play based on the novel "Dracula" that was first produced in 1924. Being a play, the writers economized on the cast of characters and the plot significantly, and the Tod Browning's 1931 film adaptation actually drew more from that version than from the novel. In a small and weird case of fiction preceding reality, there actually was a major revival of the play in 1977, just three years after this issue came out.