If science teaches us anything, it teaches us to accept our failures, as well as our successes, with quiet dignity and grace. Gene Wilder: Famous Monsters style.
This image was a weird ride. It started off as a color version of my earlier "splash page" piece, evolved into using those imges as a cover and then took a right turn into Doctor Doom territory. It was fun to use the more salacious elements of Blacula's marketing to make something garish ... but William Marshall deserves better. Marshall (and, by proxy, Prince Mamuwalde) had real gravitas, so I began to wonder what kind of stories about "Blacula" we might get with the world as a canvas. I also didn't want to lose sight of the fact that Mamuwalde had become a villain. So, this is what we get.
There's a video store in Colts Neck, New Jersey, that has a back room filled with unlikely titles. Available for rent are such movies as Stanley Kubrick's "Napoleon," an unlikely collaboration between Ingmar Bergman and the Three Stooges titled "The Third Strawberry," "Four Flies on Green Felt" (a little-seen Muppet movie that's also among the most nihilistic horror movies of the 1970s) and this movie adaption of the H.P. Lovecraft story "Herbert West: Reanimator" from 1958. The full-color film starred Vincent Price in the title role, as well as Peggy Cummins and Francis Lederer.
Tags:
herbert west reanimator, re animator, vincent price, reanimator, lovecraft
If you ever want to drive anybody insane, ask them to catalog the deaths in 1985's Commando. The Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle rcks up an estimated body count between 74 and 108, most of them courtesy of Schwarzenegger's murder machine John Matrix. It's difficult to track all of the mayhem in the film ... there are conflicting number all over the internet, figures further muddled by the demolition of several paramilitary barracks (housing who knows how many people?) in the climax. These numbers are my guesstimate.
By all rights, Blacula should have had a comic book series. Marvel would have had him crossing paths with the likes of Spider-Man, Luke Cage, Howard the Duck and, of course, Dracula. DC probably would have kept him to his own world, but might have hired the likes of Michael Kaluta or Jeff Jones to illustrate it.
But that didn't happen, so I took the initiative. RIP Prince Mamuwalde.
Tags:
william marshall, mamuwalde, horror comics, vampires