The Best of Marvel’s Vampire Tales Volume One is the first in a series of Dark Horse collaborations with Marvel Comics to excavate the dark and hidden corners of the Marvel Universe and re-present them in beautiful archival hardcover editions.
Starting in 1973, Marvel Comics embarked on a series of black-and-white horror anthologies in magazine format. These magazines helped ignite a new horror-comics boom while allowing Marvel to expand the boundaries of the stories they told.
One of those series, Vampire Tales, included stories of bloodsucking fiends as both heroes, villains, and anti-heroes, involving fan-favorites like the reluctant monster Morbius, the Living Vampire; the first solo tales featuring Blade the Vampire Slayer; and Dracula’s daughter, the ever-lethal Lilith. Vampire Tales magazine also introduced the comic-book world to Satana, the Devil’s Daughter, and her introductory stories are also in this first volume.
The Best of Marvel’s Vampire Tales Volume One contains nearly 300 pages of terrifying tales from the first six issues of the magazine, including stories by comic-book talent such as Alfredo Alcala, Rich Buckler, Ernie Chan, Chris Claremont, Gerry Conway, Bill Everett, Gardner Fox, Steve Gerber, Carmine Infantino, Tony Isabella, Gil Kane, Stan Lee, Don McGregor, Pablo Marcos, Esteban Maroto, Doug Moench, Tom Palmer, John Romita, Jim Steranko, Tom Sutton, Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, and more!
This oversize collection also features full-color reproductions of Vampire Tales covers painted by the likes of Bob Larkin, Esteban Maroto, and Boris Vallejo, along with a new introduction and discussion of the Marvel horror mags’ lasting influence from writer/editor/historian Chris Ryall, as well as a number of Marvel’s most horrific monster-comic covers.
