The Fractal Hall Journal

Superheroes aside, is there any genre more prevalent in comics than horror? Or for that matter, is there any other genre with as many key works from the most gifted comics writers?

I like most horror comics in retrospect. I was too young to appreciate Sandman, Swamp Thing, or Hellblazer on their original runs. I remember seriously disliking them, though I love them all now in my own fickle way. But as much as I wasn’t keen on the grown-up stuff, I did like Marvel horror.

Ok, that was a bit mean, but you catch my drift. I liked the ’90s Ghost Rider, and I got to read some of the Johnny Blaze stuff (along with a couple of Son of Satan titles) that belonged to the father of one of my dearest buddies. But it wasn’t until the Tomb of Dracula Essential volumes that I realised quite how good Marvel’s material could be.

Tomb of Dracula benefitted from a consistent creative team for the bulk of its run. Any success the series has should really be credited to Gene Colan, an incredible penciller who brought a high standard to every issue, raising the overall quality even on the ropier scripts.

In all honesty, if the comic lets itself down anywhere, it’s the writing. The first few issues were written by a good few different people, giving the series an oddly disjointed tone, where it couldn’t decide if it was a straight sequel to the movie Draculas, the novel, or something else. The series continuity was somewhat fluid, and it took Marv Wolfman a number of years to tie down what exactly the relationship was between Dracula and his antagonists.

But despite the overwrought dialogue, occasional crap comedy relief and contradictions in the plot, the series gained a uniquely creepy atmosphere, not so much a take-off of other Dracula films, or an integrated part of the Marvel Universe (despite the odd dischordant crossover), as a sinister creature all of its own.

The key to the series is something that only comics can really pull off: a character study that evolves over many years. No television series could really delve into a central character the way Tomb of Dracula could, and no production team could really work on the one thing for so long- and it’s rare even in comics today. Because of this, and because the vampire hunters could never truly win, as it would mean killing off the title character, the series’ horror became based entirely around one man’s deeds, in both the past and the present, and examined his limits, motives and justifications.

In short, the length of the work combined with the consistency of vision created something intriguing and engaging, even through the occasional duff issue. It was the overall arc that held it together, as thematically complete as a Bowie album.

Don’t know about you, but I’d certainly pay to see the film.

Last Christmas, the highstreet record shops all decided to clear out the Bowie back catalogue at less than a fiver a pop. I binged like a politician at a half-priced cocaine festival. At one point I had five discs queued up in the car, and brothers and sisters, that is far too much Starman for any one human mind to cope with.

A David Bowie hangover is brutal.

Listening to these albums (these many, many albums) makes me realise how they really are complete works, in the sense that every track fits together as part of a whole. The major songs stand out of course, Changes, Sound and Vision, Golden Years and so on, but while these tracks have a seperate existence outside of the album they also take on a different significance when played as part of a larger piece of work. Not even necessarily in terms of an ongoing narrative, like the story thread that runs through The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, but also as thematically complete albums, like Station to Station or “Heroes”.

Even accepting that Bowie is a one-off, it’s difficult not to descend into old-fartery and moan about the lack of consistency over modern albums. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard plenty of brilliant singles over the past couple of years , but they rarely come from an album worth listening to in its entirety.

It isn’t surprising. We’re in the iPod era now. It won’t be long before the album concept will be the exception rather than the norm, when the need to buy physical objects to gain access to music becomes irrelevant. Entertainment becomes fragmentary, bite-sized downloads making up what Warren Ellis described as ‘burst culture’.

Blogs, mp3s and webcomics are all part of this culture, but monthly comic books and collections are not. Individual issues may have been the forerunner of this type of culture, but with a few exceptions the days of standalone issues are long gone. I don’t mean it as a criticism as I far prefer multi-part stories myself, but God knows the increasingly convoluted continuity and never ending multi-part crossover have long outstayed their welcome.

My biggest problem with these swollen and bloated stories is their lack of coherence. There are too many broken links and inconsistencies, and the more titles that crossover, the less you feel you know or understand. The more information you’re given, the more information you feel you lack.

Every issue should act like a track that builds to a complete album. They shouldn’t all be attempts at a barnstorming single, because that gets old quickly too. All the seperate parts should fit. There’s no doubt this approach works, inevitably in titles that are either completely seperated from an external continuity (like All-Star Superman, or Y: The Last Man), or at best only minimally affected by endless crossover (Green Lantern or Blue Beetle, while not completely divorced from the DCU, to date have had very little interference in the main run, i.e. we haven’t been expected to pick up seperate titles to get a full story, and even when we have the issue’s remained relatively self-contained. The exception of course being the recent Sinestro Corps, but even that stays pretty much within the GL titles).

Which brings me to Tomb of Dracula.

No, not this one:

  Or this one, although he is vaguely pertinent to this post:

  No, this time I’m talking about Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. You know, David Bowie would make a great big screen Stephen Strange, even if he doesn’t really look the part.

I’ve got a post brewing about Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula run, and some of Marvel’s other horror titles. I first read about many of the characters when they turned up as guests in superhero titles; Werewolf by Night in Ghost Rider, for example, and Hannibal King in Dr Strange. Werewolf by Night, incidentally, should by rights be one of my favourites, but it really isn’t. I like the concept, and of the horror genre’s Big Three I tend to prefer wolves to bats or the walking dead. For now I’ll just note I can’t get past the awful pun used for the character’s secret ID.

Some years ago, I picked up some second hand Dr Strange comics from Hay-on-Wye, Wales’ foremost repository of knowledge, second-hand books and dust. Paper is cheap, while food is expensive. A good place to be if you want obscure hardbacks, old Justice League issues, or if you’re a goat. My enduring love of pre-supervillain Tony Stark comes from a copy of the Armour Wars I found there when I was 9.

One Dr Strange cover, from what I remember, had a warthog version of the main character. I’m really going to have to dig that one up. The other one was one of the middle parts of “The Montescu Formula”. It’s the first time I read any horror-related stuff, and it stuck in my subconscious. I never realised it was a fairly significant storyline, or at least as significant as you can get in the niche-within-a-niche of Marvel’s magic-based titles, and I never thought I’d ever find out how it finished. I hadn’t thought about it in years, when the collected edition turned up at my local comics emporium.

It was this, plus Brian K. Vaughan’s incredible Doctor Strange miniseries that brought the good Doctor back to my attention. I can understand completely why many writers find the character difficult, not least because of his near-omnipotence and the inconsistant nature of his powers.

These difficulties are brought to the forefront in crossover stories that emphasise Marvel’s shared-world. These events invite you to compare the power levels of, for example, Spider-man villians to other heroes, the disparaties becoming painfully obvious. After all, how long, exactly, would it take for Thor to knock Kraven the Hunter out? To the nearest second? It was stated explicitly in Civil War that Strange could have ended the whole thing with a wave of his hand; excuses need to be thought up to preclude the involvement of characters as powerful as that, to the detriment of these characters and the underlying meaning of the work.

But on their own, in their own titles, characters like these can be emersed in limitless unreality, free to explore underworlds and outer realms if imagination, a mystical reflection to complement Jack Kirby’s pseudo-scientific cosmos. If Doctor Strange needs anything, it’s less a grounding in a grim, realistic world than a Grant Morrison style journey into the extraordinary. And extraordinary is one thing a Doctor Strange title needs to be.