Cover Story - Top 15 Werewolf By Night Covers

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Earlier in the week I mused on the way vampires didn’t truly survive their popular peak during the transition years from the 2000s to the 2010s.  I considered making a similar opening but about werewolves but when you get down to it, I can’t say werewolves were ever as popular as vampires.  The biggest standard bearer for the werewolf genre in the modern era is probably Teen Wolf and good though that show is I had to check to make sure it was still ongoing.  My point is that it didn’t come with the same impactful popularity as Twilight/True Blood/Vampire Diaries. 

No, the true last hurrah for the werewolf was the ‘70s, when films like American Werewolf in London were redefining the subgenre.  In that spirit and because I want to double cash-in on Underworld: Blood Wars, I’m taking a look at Marvel’s big hit werewolf book of the era- Werewolf By Night.  This was seriously one of Marvel’s most successful horror comics alongside Tomb of Dracula, running about half the decade and spawning characters that persist to this day like Moon Knight.  It’s a fun dive into the weird blend of comic book spookiness, early horror-xploitation aesthetics, and superhero storytelling that we’re going to honor here today. 

Comics Rainbow - Vampires

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Vampires; there’s a trend that really didn’t manage to survive the decade.  I’m not saying we don’t have vampire stories anymore, in fact, the upcoming release of the 5^th Underworld film is the entire reason I elected to dedicate this article to the subject.  But in a much more pointed way vampires just aren’t the cultural draw they were in that window of transition from 2007-2010.  

You can probably blame Twilight for that, as it both catalyzed vampires as a popular craze while also poisoning the well for all future vampire stories- hence why most of the Twilight imitators gravitated towards young adult fiction than vampires.  Still, the undead probably won’t be going away entirely given that they’ve been a staple of pop culture since Nosferatu, to the point they’ve thoroughly colonized comics as well as movies, TV, and books.  So let’s get the full spectrum on comic book vampires.

Cover Story - Top 12 Tomb of Dracula Covers

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It is currently the dregs of August, and there’s really nothing going on in pop culture.  The dizzying high of summer blockbuster season has given away to the drippy sludge that is the late August offerings while the fall awards season has yet to begin.  If there is one small bit of comfort in the pre-labor day dark, it’s that we’re entering the season of fall TV premieres, which is perfect for someone like me that clings to media topicality as a guiding light in these troubled and rudderless times.  

This week will be bringing us the premiere of the latest season of The Strain, FX’s prestige vampire apocalypse show from the mind of Guillermo Del Toro (he wrote the books it’s based on.)  Even though I don’t like The Strain all that much it is pretty much the only name in vampire fiction these days, thank Twilight, which means I get to talk about the biggest name in comic book vampires- Count Dracula.  I’ll get more into this as we go along but for a time in the ‘70s Count Dracula was one of Marvel comics biggest success stories and today- we honor that legacy.