Tomb of Dracula Presents Throne of Blood

This one-shot is weird in a few ways. ‘Tomb of Dracula’ is in larger print than the story title, but the Dracula connection is totally irrelevant – two pages at the start and one at the end wherein someone alleged to be Dracula, but bearing no resemblance on any level to the one Marvel have been showing us for decades (unless I am out of date on this), offers a ‘let me tell you about’ framing sequence. I read through the indicia expecting to find that it had first been published, perhaps without that frame, in Eastern Europe, guessing from the creators’ names, but there is no sign of that.

Anyway, the tale Dracula offers us is a Japanese vampire story, created by people who have probably spend up to an hour researching the country, or at least seen a samurai movie once. As a big afficionado of Japan (my other website), this bugs me more than it would for any other country. Japan has its own vampire traditions, a bit different from the European ones; it struck me as fair enough that they would use the vampire rules as established in the Marvel Universe, but either way it is very weird that the Japanese characters don’t seem at all familiar with the vampire concept. It gets all sorts of other things wrong, from weaponry to architecture (it refers to covering up windows, for fuck’s sake!), to a noblewoman still waiting to become engaged to our hero in her 20s. It also dates it into one of the most hectic eras of Japanese history, right in the middle of the Azuchi-Momoyama period, then makes no use of or even reference to the massive civil war going on at the time. The artists don’t really know how to draw Japanese people either, doing particularly badly on our hero – his big pointy nose is particularly ridiculous. I couldn’t see any reason for it to be set in Japan, no ways in which the story would be different if set in Europe at the same time – I guess they just fancied doing a samurai vampire story.

And I don’t get how the protagonist is a hero at the end of the story – if becoming a vampire turns everyone evil, without exception, why is it different for him? Why was he stupid enough to allow himself to get bitten anyway? Come to that, why go into what he knew must be hostile territory, an enemy’s castle, without his armour or swords? And why are the vampires in his home castle keeping themselves secret and making no attempts to bite the one person who could conceivably stop them, until he shows up in full armour, at which point they reveal themselves openly? Why did the initial vampire enemy, an almost unbeatable general, stand around gloating with his dangerous foe standing behind him?

The story made no sense to me, and there was no tension or suspense since the framing sequence gives away that the main character still exists as a vampire at some later date. The art starts promisingly, but it is much stronger on the framing sequence than the rest – another reason to suspect this is a later addition. It’s reasonably efficient and with some good panels here and there, but a lot of it looks a bit rushed and shoddy. It also seems kind of dated – obviously colouring is far more technically sophisticated these days, but otherwise the style would have fitted in fine at Marvel decades ago.

I don’t really get the point of this – it’s not much good on any level, and it has nothing to do with the Tomb of Dracula title, presumably added in the hope of selling it to people who liked that comic, who will be disappointed. I could see the sense if it were part one of a series, pitting this other Dracula against this noble samurai vampire, but it is a one-off story. Maybe there will be more ToD Presents comics to come, I don’t know – but I really can’t see this mediocre comic being the kind of hit that will encourage that.