Dark Horse Comics; $14.99

When Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson first approached him about the idea of reuniting with artist Gene Colan for another, different take on Dracula, writer Marv Wolfman has said he had a lot of concerns. After all, his 67-issue run on Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula with Colan and Tom Palmer is considered one of the hallmarks of his long career.

Following their Tomb of Dracula collaboration, Wolfman and Colan worked on DC’s Night Force in the 1980s. Then, after weighing the pros and cons, they reteamed in 1998 for the three-issue series The Curse of Dracula.

The new series was a more modern take on Dracula. It also featured a new supporting cast, and they seem a bit closer to current as well. Colan’s art is moody and evocative, as one would expect. While I’ve been a huge fan of his straight-from-the-pencils art on the two Nathaniel Dusk, Private Investigator series from DC, I think I might have preferred Tom Palmer’s inks on this series as well. Take that with a grain of salt because Dave Stewart’s colors worked brilliantly over Colan’s pencils.

Wolfman’s script is great. It doesn’t make you forget about Tomb of Dracula, but it also doesn’t spend any time drawing similarities (the only ones are that it stars Dracula and there are some humans trying to stop him). Even today it screams that it’s ready for follow-up stories.

It always seemed like a shame that Dark Horse never commissioned more of this series because it worked well. There was a trade paperback collection published in 2005, and a hardcover in February 2013, but that was it.

Whether you pick up the individual back issues or one of the collections, it’s a great ride.

– J.C. Vaughn

Editor’s note: When the hardcover was released in 2013, Scoop talked with writer Marv Wolfman about the series.