or Will The Real Blade Please Stand Up? Because when all’s said and done, we’ve always preferred the original seventies comic book Blade to the revised, enhanced version of the late nineties and the films. And maybe because Blade is actually British, which has been rather forgotten in the slew of Marvel re-imaginings over the last twenty years…
So yes, in one of our last entries for Black Vampire Week, we can state firmly that Blade the Vampire Killer (or Slayer, or Hunter) was born Eric Brooks in Soho, London, England, and raised as a Londoner. Honest.
We don’t find that out immediately in the comics. Created by writer Marv Wolfman and penciller Gene Colan, Blade’s first appearance was in the comic book The Tomb of Dracula #10 (1973), an all-action issue which had little time for flashbacks. And to be fair, they messed with his origins a few times even back in the seventies, though they never went as far as to make him Wesley Snipes and give him an American origin – that came much, much later.
In the original Tomb of Dracula comics, in early guest appearances and in Marvel Preview #3 (1975), Blade’s mother was bitten during the last stages of a difficult pregnancy, and Blade was the child delivered before she died. Who bit her was never stabilised – there were stories with an unnamed vampire, then a specific vampire, Deacon Frost (who would enter the main Blade mytho-verse), and even occasionally Dracula. Writers often played a bit fast and loose in those days.
The result was reasonably consistent, though. Blade is simply a human who, because of the events surrounding his birth, cannot be turned by a vampire’s bite. Having been raised in a brothel (with suggestions that his mother had been one of the prostitutes there) and told of what happened, he grows up mad as hell, with a serious chip on his shoulder. Which seems reasonable.
Tomb of Dracula presents him as a guy with a grudge, ready to kill any bloodsucker. Wolfman and Colan, however talented, could not come up with much in the way of an English accent, though, and so Blade talks more like Detroit than Soho a lot of the time. Throughout those early appearances, everyone else speaks in polite or cod-English, with some bizarre language from and about the London police especially – the ‘fuzzies’ appear and say things like “haul your black butt inta the wagon.”
Depictions of Britain itself vary between seventies modern, unlikely castles and faux-Dickens slums, but you do have vampiric English teen thugs, wicked nobility, and an annoyed New Scotland Yard. There’s no mistaking the London-centred nature of it all.
But he’s great. No huge swords or techno-weapons, no mutant talents – just a guy in coloured goggles and a green or purple jacket, with an afro and a bandolier of wooden knives – variously teak, ebony or mahogany. Very physically fit and very determined, with nothing else about him but the attitude, he manages to slay even Dracula (temporarily, of course). A real hero, with a touch of anti-hero loner about him.
Tomb of Dracula #30 and Marvel Preview #3 provide more detailed background material. We learn of Blade being brought up by the other women in the brothel, and exposed to vampire hunting through encounters with a man called Jamal Afari, an old jazz trumpeter, who fought vampires with silver but who was later turned. Blade hangs out at Slow-Boy’s, a London jazz club, was taught to play the horn, and so forth. We also learn that back in 1968, he was in China with other human vampire hunters, all Black, called Ogun, Azu, Musenda and Orji. Dracula is supposed to have killed all of them except Musenda (we believe) eventually, but it was there that Blade learned the value of using wooden knives, before returning to London.
(Marvel Preview #3 follows on from Vampire Tales #8 and #9 (1974) and is well worth picking up). The original Blade in full action against the Legion of the Damned.
As time passes in the seventies, Blade loses the afro, which is a shame, and grows a chin-beard, but still goes out there with his trademark jacket, goggles and bandolier of knives. It’s a great portrayal of an angry man. He’s no teenager – origin dates vary, but he’s at least in his mid-thirties, possibly much older – and he doesn’t take kindly to anyone interfering in his work. Other vampire hunters floating around Britain, such as Quincy Harker and Rachel van Helsing, do not find him easy to work with.
“You know you just killed a teenager, Blade?”
“That’s Mister Blade, Harker – and, frankly, I don’t give a flying hoot! He was a stinkin’ vampire.”
BLADE: THE RETREAD VERSION
But this is Comicsworld, and they couldn’t leave it alone. By the late 1990s, Blade becomes American (from Detroit, rather than only talking like that), and then… he turns into Wesley Snipes. Who gives us Blade as a dhampir (see later below), a human with vampire strengths but not their weaknesses, with the background timeshift that the attack on Blade’s mother happened in1967; doctors were able to save the baby, but the woman died of an unknown infection.
It’s not that we don’t like the films, or even some of the later comics, but yeah, we really want the afroed, knife-throwing British Black Bad Boy of the seventies, when Wesley was a mere teenager, and everyone could dig the cat who knew where it was at, the man you didn’t mess with…
Blade the Vampire Killer.
DHAMPIRS ALIVE
As an addendum, the folklore side: Blade has been described as dhampir, the child of a union between a vampire and a human. Quite how this applies in this case is uncertain, as rather than him being the unlikely offspring of two genetic strains, the comics seem to suggest that some unknown factor was passed from the bitten mother to the child, presumably through the placenta.
Nor, as we’ve said, do they use the dhampir angle in the comics at first (he is eventually bitten by Morbius the Living Vampire and gains quite a few directly vampiric/dhampiric characteristics).
Dhampir, a word of Albanian origin, had its own variable place in Slav folklore, and we can do no better than to direct you to Andy Paciorek of the Folk Horror revival, who wrote an entire book on Eastern European myths which we covered a while ago. In his Black Earth: A Field Guide to the Slavic Otherworld, he says:
In East European lore it is not uncommon for dead husbands to visit their still living wives. Sometimes they will feed on the vitality of their spouse, but sometimes they will still follow other matrimonial desires. It was believed, particularly amongst gypsies, that should a male child be born of the union between a widow and her revenant husband (or sometimes lover if out of wedlock) then the baby boy will grow up to be a being known as a Dhampir. Known sometimes as the ‘Devil’s Partner’, Dhampires are actually a force against evil, though their power demands both fear and respect. Dhampires assume the role of Vampire-hunters and are well equipped for the position for it is said that they possess great speed, strength and agility and the ability to see invisible spirits anti recognise vampires at sight.
There’s more in the actual book, which you can get through the link below (it’s also heavily illustrated by Andy):
black earth by andrew l paciorek
As we close down Black Vampire Week, don’t forget that SLAY, full of some fantastic authors, is due out on 13th October, and available to pre-order now:
Actually while the movies had certainly a stronger impact in redefining Blade, the whole human vampire hybrid angle comes from the 90’s Spider -Man animated series, that and Whistler as a mentor. Goyer probably choose elements from various sources to write his version of the character and the Spider-Man cartoon was one of them.