Nerding Day: Dracula Vs. X-Men (Patreon)

An under-discussed downside of becoming an X-Man is the Dracula problem. Dracula loves to pester the X-Men. He’s not an X-Man; he's regular, not trademarked Dracula. There is an X-Men character named Wolfsbane who is just a straight-up werewolf, but vampires aren’t X-Men. They could have, and I think should have, made Dracula an X-Man; he’s dramatic, tortured, and has inconsistent power levels; he would fit right in!

Instead, they made Dracula a dude who really wants to bang Storm, which, aren’t we all? What a deeply unspecial introduction to Dracula for the X-Men world. The X-Men first meet Dracula in 1982 during Uncanny X-Men #159. Previously, Marvel quarantined Dracula to his own comic, Tomb Of Dracula, but he broke quarantine in the mid-70s, first for an encounter with Spider-Man before he decided the X-Men were who he really wanted to bother.

The X-Men first meet Dracula in New York, where they’ve brought Kitty Pryde to visit her parents. When Storm doesn’t arrive from dropping Kitty off, Wolverine is able to track her to a local hospital where she’s in bad shape after having her throat cut during a random mugging. Or was it? She’s suddenly lethargic, allergic to sunlight, and she’s mysteriously acquired a slick scarf with an elaborately embroidered letter D on it. All of these symptoms point to Dracula.

Kitty Pryde is immediately like, that bitch got Draculad, but who would believe her? Who would believe that the woman who creates storms with her mind was bitten by Dracula? Maybe the man who can teleport, the man whose eyes are a portal to the punch dimension, or the immortal little sharp guy? Any X-Man should believe in Dracula, and if they don’t, they’re an idiot. Of course it’s Dracula, of course Dracula is into Storm, and of course no one is being cool about it.

I just don’t think Storm is falling for anyone who wears a cape more fabulous than hers. More than one cape wearer in a relationship is just asking for trouble, and this man's cape goes all the way up past his ears.

Luckily, Kitty Pryde immediately ran off to get a cross and her Dracula hunting hat earlier, so she can attempt to wrangle Storm out of Dracula’s horny paws. The cross doesn’t work on Dracula because Kitty is Jewish, but he burns himself on her Star of David when he grabs her throat. The Dracula hat did nothing.

Dracula flees from Kitty Pryde’s necklace, but he takes Storm with him, so now this is fully an X-Men problem. This is where Professor X would normally get involved, but that man is always either in a coma or on space vacation, so Nightcrawler, Colossus, Wolverine, and Kitty Pryde are fighting Dracula on their own. Once again, Chris Claremont is having too much fun with this premise.

It’s a classic X-Men fight. Nightcrawler is able to burn Dracula with a cross because of his strong catholic faith. Dracula summons a bunch of wolves and rats to the fight. Colossus picks up Wolverine by the butt and hurls him at Dracula.

There’s no way this team could defeat Dracula, though. In order to do that, Storm has to use her love of Kitty to break free of Dracula’s mind control and whoop some Dracula ass. Dracula turns into a half-bat, and they have a radical mid-air flight during which Dracula tells her that she can never escape him because they’ve shared blood.

At the end, Dracula is so annoyed by Storm that he just kind of flies out of the window and leaves forever like he’s running out on a bad date. Storm threatens to hunt him down, and he’s just like, “Sure, good luck with that, I’m Dracula,” which is a fair point. Sometimes it’s easy to find a man in an insanely tall cape, but on Halloween it’s almost impossible, so Storm just decides not to investigate the situation any further. Being filled to the brim with Dracula blood is probably fine.

Guys, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it actually wasn’t fine! A few months later Dracula came right back, and that stuff about them bound by blood for eternity comes into play in a major way. It turns out Dracula can still control Storm, and more troublingly, whenever she dies she’ll become a vampire bound to Dracula, which is a major problem because X-Men die all the time.

Is it just me or is it kind of sweet that Dracula was willing to let Storm live out a full life and join him at whatever age she died? I need an eighty-six-year-old vampire Storm and Dracula comic right now. It is possible that he let her go because he also knew that X-Men die all the time, but I like to believe the romantic version.

This time Dracula has a specific task for Storm. He wants her to heist a magic book with something called “the Montesi formula” in it that can kill all vampires for him. Apparently this was later used to kill all vampires in Dr. Strange, but they got better. The Montesi formula is being kept in a castle that is too holy and full of eldritch energy for Dracula. Storm is not Dracula enough to enter the castle, but she’s also Dracula enough that she has to do what Dracula says, so she’s the perfect woman for the job. Also, Kitty Pryde is acting weird and also trying to steal the formula.

It turns out Kitty Pryde was actually being controlled by Dracula’s daughter, who wants to kill him. So the first comic had one Dracula, and the second had two Draculas. Will the Draculas continue to increase exponentially in each comic until the X-Men are battling Dracula’s third cousins as well?

Probably not because Dracula is presumed dead in the end (he’s not; he gets better). Dracula’s daughter tells everyone that Dracula’s death means that Storm actually won’t become a vampire when she dies. Since he didn’t really die, I feel like this means Storm is still on track to rise from the dead, but who knows. I still have hope that the Storm and Dracula buddy comedy could happen. Maybe they team up to fight skeletons or God or something. I’d preorder Storm and Dracula kill God immediately.

After that, Dracula left the X-Men alone for a while and then came back in a slightly less horny way for the 2006 series Apocalypse vs Dracula. Ok, it was a little horny, but it was mainly dark and gritty, a thing all comics were going for at the time. I’m going to spoil it for you because I don’t want you to waste your time hoping; no, Dracula and Apocalypse do not kiss at all.

There’s barely any kissing in Apocalypse Vs. Dracula and far too much men getting their heads shlorped right off. If you don’t know what a man getting his head shlorped off in a comic book looks like, here you go; it’s pretty funny.

The plot of Apocalypse Vs. Dracula is that before Dracula died, he met Apocalypse in battle once, and Dracula has been salty about it for roughly two thousand years. That man loves a grudge almost as much as he loves a tall cape. Dracula decided to regulate his emotions by decimating Apocalypse’s doomsday cult babies to provoke him into a fight.

Across the four-issue series, we mostly don’t see Dracula and Apocalypse fight at all. We do see a lot of people get their head shlorped, though. One guy gets his head teleported right off of his body, which was pretty radical. A more accurate title for this comic would be “A Good Excuse For Gratuitous Violence.”

Apocalypse Vs. Dracula ends with Apocalypse getting so frustrated with his whole doomsday cult that he just kills all of them and decides he doesn’t want to do a cult anymore. He returns to hibernation, thinking all of his descendants are dead and the cult is over. That’s how annoying Dracula is to the X-Men; he annoyed one of their greatest villains into giving up his army for a long nap. Of course Apocalypse did squeeze in one more Dracula shlorp before nap time (he’s fine).

Then, of course, there was famously the time where Jubilee became a vampire for almost a full decade, but that wasn’t Dracula’s fault! His son did that. The whole Dracula family is completely obsessed with the X-Men. They have enough to deal with, Dracula! If you were considering becoming an X-Man, please keep in mind the many silent battles you will have to fight, with Dracula.

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