First off. Colan when inked by Jack Abel is not as good as Colan inked by Tom Palmer, or even better Colan himself. Luckily there’s only a couple of Abel inked issues. As the cover suggests, the bulk of this book is written by Marv Wolfman, but the first few issues have some other writers. Gerry Conway starts the thing off introducing the nominal protagonist dissolute playboy Frank Drake. His first issue is OK, but the second is kinda poor. It has a Tor Johnson clone character “Gort” appear out of nowhere, that is either really bad writing or there’s a story from another comic missing. This character is then never used again, but another similar character Taj appears in the very next issue. Then Archie Goodwin does a couple of issues, starting a story that introduces more of the regular cast, Rachel Van Helsing and the aforementioned Taj. That story is then finished by Gardner Fox, a writer more often associated with DC.
Then in issue 7, Marv Wolfman comes on board, and slowly pushes the comic from the standard horror fare delivered thus far into a strange mix of comic book horror and Marvel style superheroics. The key step is the introduction in issue 10 of Blade. I was surprised to see just how much of a John Shaft rip-off he was at first. Blade’s presence ups the action aspect a great deal compared to the relatively ineffectual Drake and Van Helsing (even Dracula jokes later on how often she finds her crossbow bolts failing to kill him as he turns to mist). Blade, like many of Marvel’s 70s heroes is very much a “me-too” fad cash in hero, but he works well in the context of the book.
Despite the introduction of Blade, and some slightly OTT vampire hunting gadgetry (a wheelchair that fires stakes, wooden bullets etc..), there’s still plenty of stories where Dracula himself is the focus rather than his would be hunters. One of the more enjoyable Essentials for the actual stories more than the nostalgia elements, and the printing was a good quality (some of the stories in the second Spectacular Spider-Man volume I got recently had muddy reproductions). Well worth dropping £10 on.