Dracula Lives #7

New Monster mag i picked up.
Dracula Lives #7
Dracula Lives was a magazine-sized, black-and-white-interior comic from the 1970's, part of Marvel's larger effort to dominate the comic-magazine field and do away with pesky rivals like Warren Publishing. The effort was a failure, but some interesting issues did come out of it, especially those devoted to horror and monster themes.

Dracula Lives was on the shelves at the same time as the longer-running Tomb of Dracula comic. The continuities of the two overlapped, with story lines often weaving between the two; most of the time, however, the magazine tales were stand-alone stories, more generic adventures of the Count. Because of the magazine format, DL could afford to be a little racier - but, unfortunately, it rarely was. Instead, what we got were Dracula stories by various creative teams from the Marvel stable, alongside a partial adaptation of the original Bram Stoker novel and articles on the Count's doings in the movies. This provided a fairly decent mixture of material, but the main meat of the magazine - the comic stories - were only slightly above average most of the time. It was interesting to see the King of Vampires in various historical periods and different situations; but what this also meant was that the internal consistency and continuity of stories was uneven and ultiamately unsatisfying.