Blade First Appearance: The Tomb of Dracula #10 (1973)

Some heroes are born on the cover of a #1, with their name in capital letters. Others appear in passing in a series devoted to someone else, without anyone guessing they will one day outgrow it. Blade clearly belongs to the second category. In 1973, the star is named Dracula, and the vampire hunter is just one more character in an already numerous cast.

This article concentrates on that precise issue: what it contains, how to recognize it, what distinguishes it from its reprints, and how it stands relative to the rest of the series. The character's full biography and the guide to the whole series are covered in two other articles, to which we refer rather than repeat them.

The issue sheet

The issue opens on the London docks. A young couple trying to leave for America is attacked by three vampires who claim to be members of Dracula's Legion. A man interrupts them: Blade, armed with wooden knives. He eliminates them without difficulty. Quincy Harker, the old wheelchair-bound vampire hunter, and his daughter Edith join him and reproach him for having killed vampires who could have led them to their master. Blade brushes them off: he will hunt in his own way.

Meanwhile, Dracula is the star guest of a private cruise organized by a rich man, who presents him as an aristocrat suffering from a blood disease. Dracula intends to exert his influence over these powerful passengers. Blade boards, and the confrontation turns to disaster: Dracula has the ship rigged and flees, even abandoning his servant Clifton Graves. Blade evacuates the passengers before the explosion. Dracula swears revenge.

One line sums up the character's tone from his first page: the hero introduces himself as Blade, the vampire killer. Everything is already there: the self-assurance, the solitude, the refusal of any hierarchy.

How the character was born

Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan have both told the character's genesis. Wolfman wanted a Black hero and told Colan so straight away. The idea of the knife bandolier comes from the writer; the leather jacket and the overall look, from the artist, who wanted a character with a very heroic appearance.

Wolfman also acknowledged later that he had deliberately kept Blade at a distance for a time. He feared the character would eclipse the others, and he was not satisfied with his own dialogue, which he found too stereotyped. He therefore pulled him from the series for about a year, before bringing him back with sparer writing. This choice explains why Blade is so little present in the issues immediately following his first appearance, and why issue 10 was not, at the time, perceived as an important issue.

After issue 10: the following appearances

Blade returns as early as issue 12 of the series. He then appears intermittently in Tomb of Dracula, then outside the series: he faces Morbius in 1974 in Adventure into Fear #24, then gets his first solo story in the black-and-white magazine Vampire Tales #8, dated December 1974, still written by Wolfman. Our article on the history of Morbius revisits this first crossover.

It would take until 1994 for Blade to get a regular color series in his name, Blade the Vampire Hunter, in ten issues. The rest of his trajectory, from the Nightstalkers to the 2000s series, is traced in our history of Blade in comics.

For a collector, this chronology has a practical consequence: there are few "key" Blade issues in the 1970s, and issue 10 concentrates most of the demand. The following appearances in Tomb of Dracula have a completist's interest, not a speculative one.

Recognizing an original copy

The reprints: what they are worth for reading

The story of issue 10 has been taken up in the series' omnibus collections, first in black and white, then in color. For reading the story, these collections are by far the best solution: they place Blade's appearance back in the continuity of the previous issues, with Quincy Harker and the group of hunters the series has already established.

For the collection, however, a reprint never replaces the original. The market pays for the first printing, not the story. The logic is the same as for all Silver Age and Bronze Age first appearances, and our article on the difference between first printing and reprint details how to avoid confusion, notably with modern tribute issues that reuse an old cover.

What the series says about the issue

The Tomb of Dracula is one of the most esteemed horror series of its era, notably thanks to the long partnership of Wolfman and Colan. Issue 10 is neither its first issue, nor the most important for the series itself. It became the most sought-after for an outside reason: the later career of a supporting character.

It is a textbook case. An issue's value does not depend on its place in its own series, but on what the rest of popular culture later does with the characters it introduces. For the series as a whole, its arcs and its other notable issues, our Tomb of Dracula guide is the reference.

The role of cinema in demand

Demand for this issue has followed the adaptations. The first film devoted to the character came out in 1998 and made Blade one of the publisher's first heroes to succeed in cinema, several years before the wave of big franchises. Two sequels came out in 2002 and 2004. Our comparisons between the 1998 film and the comics show what the adaptation changed, starting with the very nature of the character.

A new film was announced in 2019, and its production has gone through many delays since. Each announcement tended to revive interest in issue 10, then let it fall back when the project drifted away. We give no market value here: no reliable and recent source publishes one that we can date, and demand for this issue depends too much on cinema news for an isolated figure to make sense.

What can be said is the relative hierarchy. In Blade's universe, issue 10 of Tomb of Dracula is without competition: it is the only first appearance that truly matters. Among Bronze Age horror issues, it is among the most closely followed. Our ranking of the best vampire comics places it in its genre.

Frequently asked questions