The idea had already occurred to
me. Why not make a vampire into a superhero?
So in 1971, I parted with 60 of
the cents I’d earned as a cinema usher to snatch Eerie 32 off the Effingham, IL, newsstand, and treated myself to Superhero!, a comic horror story written
by Steve Skeates and illustrated (with a wink at Gil Kane) by Tom Sutton.
The punch line? Crime Crusher’s
crusade left bad guys bloodless.
The idea has been recycled several
times, notably in the saga of Blade, the vampire hunter turned vampire created
by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan, who debuted in Tomb of Dracula 10 (July 1973).
On TV, we had Forever Knight, the 1989 vampire detective TV series
about Nick Knight, and the 1999 Buffy
spin-off series Angel.
The concept got the fully realized
graphic novel treatment in 1996 with Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. Jeremiah Parrish, a 19th century Roman
Catholic priest turned vampire, wages a mysterious war against crime as The
Confessor, using Grandenetti Cathedral as his Batcave. Busiek played the tragic
and heroic elements of the concept off against each other in a fine story.
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