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Tomb of Dracula & Gene Colan stake a claim on Collector’s Corner!

This week on Collector’s Corner, we continue to honor the memory of recently departed master artist – Gene “The Dean” Colan.  We’re taking a look at Gene’s classic work on the greatest horror comic of the Seventies – Tomb of Dracula.  Gene contributed all of the the art to the Tomb of Dracula series while Marv Wolfman contributed the scripts starting with the seventh issue in 1972 all the way to it’s end in 1979.

Gene recalled “when I heard Marvel was putting out a Dracula book, I confronted [editor] Stan [Lee] about it and asked him to let me do it. He didn’t give me too much trouble but, as it turned out, he took that promise away, saying he had promised it to Bill Everett. Well, right then and there I auditioned for it. Stan didn’t know what I was up to, but I spent a day at home and worked up a sample, using Jack Palance as my inspiration and sent it to Stan. I got a call that very day: “It’s yours.”

Colan and Wolfman were responsible for the creation of the character of Blade who would later serve as the basis for the Blade movies starring Wesley Snipes.  Gene’s work on Tomb of Dracula was moody, atmospheric and horrifying.  It stands today as a high water mark of both horror and comics in general.

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Japanese Horror Posters Keep Art Form Alive.

The 1980′s may have been the high water mark for horror poster art.  One used to be able to walk through the halls of the local video store and see a wide variety of horrific tableau’s adorning the boxes and posters promoting horror movies.  In the new millennium, we are living in an era of bland posters and box art.  A seemingly endless parade of floating heads and faces stare back at us from what now passes for movie posters.  Where artists once strived to tell a story with a single image – now these “designers” seek to inundate us with the who’s who of actors in the film.

Poster art is truly a lost art form.  That’s why it always thrills me to see the Japanese designs for Western films.  They are simply the best produced poster works on the planet.  Let’s celebrate this lost art form by taking a peek at a few fantastic designs from the land of the rising sun.