Faces of the Vampire in Comic Books
Faces of the Vampire in Comic Books

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with the issue of vampire imagery in comic-books. Considering the art of the comics as an essential part of popular culture production, I set out to trace the translation process of the image of the vampire from the folkish background to the high-literature and art, and from there to the everyday entertainment industry of the twentieth century. Although the comics are a distinct art field, having their own idioms, techniques and issues, they have never been separated from their cultural, social, economic and political milieu, taking their themes, concepts and settings from the larger cultural space they were part of. Present in comics-books, the vampire was at first a major character in folktales and high literature. The vampire made a great career in comics too, and in some aspects it became even more visible throughgraphic stories, influencing its representations in other media channels such as movies, animated series or computer games. In the following, I shall try to identify the main hypostases of the vampire in comic-books, arguing for the importance of the comic-books to the whole cultural context of the Western world and indeed for the whole of mankind.

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