The Wedding of Dracula #1 Cover by Gene Colan

Gene Colan (September 1, 1926 – June 23, 2011) - Wedding of Dracula #1 Cover Original Art (Marvel, 1993). This early nineties single-issue title featured reprints of stories from Tomb of Dracula #30, 45 and 46, written by Marv Wolfman, and Gene Colan inked as well as penciled this Marvel "monster-work."



The cover is a very gothic scene featuring Dracula and his bride, Domini. It's a dynamic cover and I greatly appreciate the emotional content. This cover may well include a mixture of love, desire, lust and hunger; is there really anything more to life? :-) Or maybe Darwin would insist that it all comes down to just lust and hunger ;-) Colan is a true master depicting Dracula as an anti-hero, here Dracula is shown like a true male chauvinist (or worse) about to take advantage of a woman in submission. Notice that Dracula firmly looks at the woman (Domini), while she doesn't return similar interest, and she's in the dark illustrating a gloomy and foreboding future. And her hand and fingers guide viewers toward her neck... This cover scene is a prime example of Gene Colan's fluid figure drawing style and expert use of shadow. The art has an image area of 10" x 15".

I think this cover is the last cover Colan ever made for a book containing stories from the original Tomb of Dracula series, but do correct me if I'm mistaken. Can't help but thinking that maybe I felt much like the Count on my own wedding night ;-)



Gene Colan is well regarded for his 70-issue run of Tomb of Dracula that ran from 1972 to 1978. Colan's work was always consistently strong and completely unique. Tomb of Dracula was arguably the most successful horror comic in the history of Marvel. Gene Colan had a remarkable run on Tomb of Dracula, drawing all 70 issues of what is generally considered the best horror series of the Bronze Age. Colan had a long run at Marvel, always producing high quality material. If you look at his early work for Marvel back in the Atlas era, you can see that his distinctive style was established early in his career and he never lost his talent over the course of more than four decades in working in the industry. Colan's landmark achievements included many years on Daredevil, his classic run on Howard the Duck plus, as mentioned above, drawing the entire Tomb of Dracula series.



The character of Count Dracula is one of the most famous in all fiction. He first appeared in Dracula, an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. As American culture shifted to a more liberal bent in the early 1970s, the Comics Code Authority was amended to allow horror stories featuring vampires and werewolves to appear for the first time since the early 1950s. Marvel jumped on this opportunity launching a number of titles, the most successful and long-running of which was Tomb of Dracula.