To be honest, I’m at a point of finding vampires sort of boring. In terms of cultural history, the most interesting thing about vampires is that they kind of exploded in pop cultural terms after staying in a fairly specific horror niche for a long time. For a while, that radial diffusion of vampires was interesting—sexy vampires, melancholic vampires, vampires who were a metaphor for disease, vampires vs. werewolves, vampires as a persecuted subculture. Funny vampires, serious vampires, campy vampires.
Once you really explore a concept like “the vampire” that widely, it starts to groan under its own weight a bit. If you’re using vampires as the central storytelling platform, you have to decide whether they’re incredibly powerful and uncanny threats to humanity and thus to amplify the horrific, inhuman nature of the vampire, or whether they’re threatened, hunted, and somewhat sympathetically human in their thinking. If it’s the former, then you’re generally taking the perspective of those who are fighting or threatened by vampires and you have to decide: how come vampires haven’t just wiped us all out, if they’re that powerful. The answer can be, “because they follow some kind of rules designed to manage human beings as cattle”—at which point you just combined vampires and conspiracy theory. The answer can be, “vampires are rare because they’re governed by mysterious and inconsistent motivations—they don’t kill everybody because for some uncanny reason they don’t or can’t, because they’re not like us”. That’s the vampire as monstrous force of nature, glimpsed only from a distance, where its resemblance to humanity is only superficial. If you’re taking the side of the vampire on some level—portraying vampires as having culture, as having human-like motivations, as equal to or threatened by non-vampiric humanity, the answer of why the entire world isn’t a vampire world is “because there’s lots of ways to kill a vampire and a lot of vampire killers”. I feel almost as if I’ve seen every move on the imaginative chessboard when it comes to vampires, though the thing about popular culture is that there’s always one more move to make.
Case in point might be this short story arc from an already-obscure and short-lived Marvel Comics series, Captain Britain and MI13. It was published from 2008-2009, running only 15 issues. I wasn’t necessarily a great fan of the major characters, most of whom had appeared in Excalibur, an X-Men spinoff and before that in other titles, but I did like the work of the author of this series, Paul Cornell, and this series didn’t disappoint.
As I re-read it now, I’m just so impressed with the plotting work and the elegance of the way Cornell kept diving into the vast sea/dumpster of Marvel’s existing continuity to fetch up clever new uses of old characters like Killpower (who was as ridiculous as he sounds in his earlier appearances) and existing storylines as well as his invention of new UK-centered characters like “Captain Midlands” and Dr. Faiza Hussein, a British Muslim who ends up wielding Excalibur.
We’ve all read stories where the writer just plain drops some dangling thread and hopes we won’t notice, or gets characters out of what seems like an impossible situation in some hackishly improvised way where it’s plain that the writer backed himself into a corner and had no idea what to do next. The last story arc of Captain Britain and MI13, “Vampire State”, is the opposite of that. Every single Chekov’s gun from the rest of the series and from many older stories gets fired off. The whole sprawling Marvel beast gets eaten from snout to tail.
The basic gist of “Vampire State” is that Dracula has set up a castle on the moon, gathered numerous vampires under this thrall, and plans to invade Great Britain and claim it for his own.
Dracula had been a character in Marvel’s universe for a while by that point, thanks to a well-functioning public domain that Disney has since tried to destroy. I never read the 1970s horror-themed comic Tomb of Dracula, so my first real encounter with Marvel’s version of Dracula was in his two big face-offs with Doctor Strange. In the second one, also one of my favorite storylines ever, Doctor Strange completely wins: he manages to cast a spell that completely eradicates all vampirism and all vampires in Earth’s dimension. I would have been happy if it had been left that way: vampires in a universe full of superpowers seem both rather mundane and rather underpowered. But nothing dies forever in the comics, so Marvel eventually brought Dracula and his kin back.
If you have to have Dracula, then “Vampire State” is the best-case scenario for how to use him. In this storyline, his real power is as a strategic thinker. For most of the story, it honestly feels like Dracula and his allies and associates have outplayed his British opponent, a secret agent named Pete Wisdom, partly because Wisdom had felt it necessary in earlier stories to give up some of the UK’s magical protections. When the penultimate issue in this story arc begins with Dracula’s seemingly total victory and assumption of absolute power over the UK on behalf of his vampiric people, it almost feels as if that’s what has actually happened. Cornell pulls one of an absolute master-class version of “it was all a dream” that rests on a character and plot device introduced in the previous story arc—he’s playing absolutely fair with the readers and making it seem perfectly plausible that Pete Wisdom has been planning to hoodwink Dracula all along. All sorts of Marvel settings and characters come into play in delightful ways: Doctor Doom has two quick appearances that are just perfect, Wakanda shows up, an obscure evil pirate spirit embedded in a magic sword from Man-Thing is pivotal to Dracula’s plot (and Pete Wisdom’s counter-plot).
Sometimes when Marvel stories try to deal with this much continuity, then end up in a ridiculous mess of unfinished argle-bargle that’s acutely embarrassing to even summarize to a non-comics-reading friend and often quite exasperating to re-read. (The X-Men in particular are just so WTF in this respect for long stretches of their history.) This storyline is hard to sum up for some similar reasons, but the plotting and character development is so much like a precision watch that re-reading it is a complete pleasure. Paul Cornell just leans into the craziness of a universe with Merlin and a British secret agency that deals with magical threats and Dracula on the moon and a British aristocrat who runs at the speed of sound but is also a vampire who is now dating an African-American vampire hunter and a British Muslim physician who wields Excalibur and it all fits together, every piece in the jigsaw being used. I don’t know that a stranger to comics could just pick it up and get everything that’s going on, but on the other hand I really hadn’t read Excalibur or heard of Killpower or seen the character Lillith before and yet it all made complete sense to me. When the good guys win in this story, it’s like the most exquisitely planned heist narrative and it is just as satisfying to re-read it now as back in 2009.