I like looking back at some of my posts on comics from years
ago and seeing what I knew then and what I know now.
At the time there were so
many gaps in my knowledge that I would make an educated guess as to the providence
of an issue or a series and be confident that I had put the available clues together
to at least form a cohesive narrative which stood up to immediate scrutiny, often with a
dash of hope that time would not make me look foolish.
I also knew that it would
only take one more missing piece of the puzzle – a date, an advertisement, a
missing issue turning up – to make me recast the narrative.
Case in point: Night
of the Vampire – at the time I was not yet au fait with the pattern of the
Yaffa Marvel series of reprints. I knew that a typical series might begin with
6 to 10 consecutive issues reprinting 3 original Marvel issues. I wasn’t so
aware that these series might run for just a few in the full magazine size
edition and then convert to digest-size issues, and then maybe revert to
reprinting one or two of the earlier issues as a late numbered issue in the
series as the licence petered out, and that those last issues may either revert
back to magazine size or remain digest-sized. Nor that once the numbered series
ended a ‘new’ unnumbered, retitled series of digest-size issues may become a
proxy reprint series of the originally published series.
And of course, the very existence of unnumbered retitled issues
was one of the greatest mysteries of all. That is, they could not be catalogued
as existing until they turned up in other collections or on the collectors’ market,
and hence you could never be sure that a full set had been compiled.
A good 10 years of spotting such issues has answered plenty
of questions for me. Not all, but enough of a pattern to give me more
confidence in the narrative of the puzzle.
The Tomb of
Dracula #3 provides one such opportunity to reflect on what I knew and didn’t
know. I wasn’t aware of this issue at the time but I had in my hands a copy of
Night of the Vampire, an unnumbered one-shot digest-sized issue from Yaffa/Page.
Whilst I was able to identify the source of the contents form Marvel and associate
it with the parallel Newton edition, I didn’t realise it was in fact a reprint
of the earlier Yaffa/Page The Tomb of Dracula #3.
One thing this does is help me to predict that there are
more issues of The
Tomb of Dracula reprinted as retitled, unnumbered one-shots. The Tomb of Dracula #1 was reprinted as The Tomb of Dracula #11, the last issue in the initial series. As above, The Tomb
of Dracula #3 was reprinted as Night of the Vampire. That suggests that there
is a retitled, unnumbered, digest-sized edition of The Tomb of Dracula #2
published by Yaffa/Page which will, at some point, turn up to take its rightful
place in the catalogue. The cover will be based on The Tomb of Dracula #2.
There are many more such instances of having identified unnumbered,
retitled Yaffa/Page digest-sized issues since my initial posts years ago, and I’ll
present them here all in good time.
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