Originally published September 25, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1297
I still remember the first time he showed up in Tomb of Dracula, with a bandolier full of wooden knives, tinted goggles, a duffle coat, and more attitude than any five vampire hunters put together. He called himself “Blade” (which, admittedly, if you’re going to name yourself after your weapon of choice, is probably a catchier name than “wooden knife”). It always seemed to me that, whereas Dracula seemed to hold the rest of the book’s supporting cast in open contempt, there was something about Blade that the master vampire found unnerving.
Perhaps he saw the movie potential. Perhaps somehow he was able to intuit that while Marvel’s headliners would wash out in a series of films that ranged from embarrassing (The Punisher, Howard the Duck—although I suspect that if they were making the exact same Howard script now with the duck done in CGI, the film would be a hit) to unreleasable (Captain America) to unreleased (The Fantastic Four) to unmade (Spider-Man, tangled—naturally—in litigation), that it would be this third string character in a second-string title (no offense, Marv) who would be the first to vault to the number one box office slot.
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