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Tuesday, October 4, 2022

Bring on the back ups - Vampire Tales issue 9 - Blood Lunge - by Russ Heath /Doug Moench

Continuing with the Halloween theme this time I focus on Marvel’s "Vampire Tales" magazine which ran for 11 issues and one annual, over the period 1973 to June 1975. The magazine featured various tales of horror based characters including Morbius, the Living Vampire, Blade the Vampire Slayer, Lilith, Dracula's daughter, and Satana, the Devil's Daughter (an amazing 4 page tale of Satana by Roy Thomas and John Romita Sr is shown here ). But it was a short vampire story by Dough Moench and Russ Heath from Vampire Tales issue 9 (December 1974) that has always stuck out in my memory. A nice tale taken to a different level by the genius of artist Russ Heath.
This story was originally printed in the wrong order in Vampire Tales issue 9 with the second page (above) being published as the fourth story Page. This was rectified when the story was reprinted in the first (and only) Vampire Tales annual in 1975.
Vampire Tales held a special place in my teenage nightmares as it featured a story that genuinely freaked me out. The tale “Where is Gallows Bend…?” written by Don McGregor and illustrated by Tom Sutton from issue 7 featured a few pages where a man is hung , the last page (below) of that story really shocked me when I saw it, but 14 years old me loved it !
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7 comments:

  1. KidOctober 4, 2022 at 1:20 AM

    Nice art. I always hate when the pages are mixed up in a comic, which happened a few times in some Marvel mags in the '70s when they did away with the corner page numbers.

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    1. McSCOTTYOctober 4, 2022 at 5:14 PM

      I certainly remember Marvel UK in the 70’s were a bit slapdash with page layouts and I seem to recall on a couple of times they didn’t publish the correct continued story from one week to another.

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    2. KidOctober 5, 2022 at 1:43 AM

      It happened with their US mags as well, which is mainly what I was thinking about, but the UK ones were also pretty mixed up at times.

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  2. Rip JaggerOctober 4, 2022 at 10:04 AM

    Russ Heath almost never lets the reader down. I just read those McGregor-Sutton stories yesterday. They are indeed very weird. Superior in many ways to what was happening in the color series in Fear.

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    1. McSCOTTYOctober 4, 2022 at 5:23 PM

      Russ Heath was such an amazingly talented artist I cant think of anything he drew in his prime that was ever less than brilliant. . That series of Morbius stories in Vampire Tales by the team of McGregor and Sutton were pretty powerful and must have had a few parents groups etc "concerned" for their kids lol . Marvel certainly pulled out the stops with some of their black and white horror line on magazines like this and “Tales of the Zombie” the latter which also gave me the chills at times.

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  3. Colin JonesOctober 4, 2022 at 1:08 PM

    I agree with Kid about mixed-up pages. I remember it happening in Marvel UK's Savage Sword Of Conan monthly #8, #9 and #11. Really infuriating!

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  4. McSCOTTYOctober 4, 2022 at 5:29 PM

    I forgot al about those early issues of the UK monthly "Savage Sword of Conan" being mixed up. that really annoyed me as well as and I cancelled my subscribed to that mag (then regretted it and ordered it from my newsagents lol) . I seem to remember that during a printers strike in the 1970s that Marvel UK also released a few issues of Avengers or MWOM in the wrong order but IPC/Fleetway and D C Thomson's never missed a beat in their numbering etc.

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