Up until the eighties Marvel used to publish comics that weren’t superheroes, all sorts from romance to western and from kung fu to horror. Many of these were instantly forgetable or cheap attempts to cash in on whatever genre became briefly popular, but they nevertheless managed to produce some classic comics. One example is Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy’s Master of Kung Fu, which made that most seventies of genres, the kung fu comic, actually worth reading, another was Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan’s Tomb of Dracula, an elegant seventies continuation of Bram stoker’s classic vampire novel. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s where Blade came from, later to star in three suprisingly good blockbuster movies. Tomb of Dracula was aimed at a somewhat older audience than your average Marvel superhero comic, especially in its shortlived magazine incarnation, which didn’t have to content with the Comics Code Authority.
Recently, Marvel has been reprinting the series in its Essential format: cheap, black and white trade paperbacks. These are ideal for fans who would like to read the series, but unable or unwilling to seek out the back issues themselves. Unfortunately however, Marvel has decided to tamper with the reprints, covering up the nudity that was present in some of the original issues, as Groovy Age of Horror reveals, which also has the scans shown here, as well as more examples of what’s been censored.
Now I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand, I dislike reprints that tamper with the original, especially when it’s not done by the original creators. On the other hand, this is not like covering up Lady Justice bare breasts: it wasn’t great art, just cheap tittilation and little is lost by the alterations. On the gripping hand, it is indictive of the current climate in the US, that things that could be sold with no trouble at newsstands in 1979 now need to be censored to sell in bookstores.